What have the Romans ever done for us designers?

I'm just back from a magical two weeks' break in Sicily, Pompeii and Napoli. While immersed in centuries-old art, culture and history, it occurred to me how much graphic designers and typographers owe to ancient Italian civilisation. Three fun facts for design geeks:

Placeholders

1.The familiar Lorem Ipsum placeholder text that we use in everyday digital layout work actually derives from Cicero's 'De Finibus', a treatise on ethics written circa 45BC. (The real Latin has been corrupted, thought to have been muddled up in the 1500s to suit a typesetter's document set up (because the design is everything, right? ??♀???)).

Joined up thinking

2. The earliest record of an ampersand (&) is at Pompeii's Lupanare (brothel). The shorthand 'et' is scrawled among the graffiti, thought to have been part of a message from one prostitute to another (how apt that these conjugal letters have a history in a brothel ??).

Italian types

3. Italics, of course! The term comes from the fancy slanty type developed in Italy to mimic calligraphy (not to be confused with oblique type, which is just slanty and not fancy).

Whoa. Grazie, Italy! ????

Read more from these:

https://www.lse.ac.uk/Test/Susanna/Lorem-ipsum https://priceonomics.com/the-history-of-lorem-ipsum/ https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2014/11/pompeii-trip/ https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/06/the-ampersand-part-1-of-2/

#typeface #graphicdesign #cicero #pomeii #romanempire #oldtimesroman