BLAWG 1 - Hieroglyphics & Design

For this week's blog we were asked to find an example of a piece of graphic design from the 21st century that was inspired or influenced by ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. I finally settled on this example of a hieroglyphic-inspired font - LMS Egyptian Bookends. Many of the hieroglyphic fonts I found online were just vector images of actual hieroglyphs themselves and were more dingbat than type. I thought that this was an interesting mix of type and hieroglyph.

This font, a display type, could be used for capital type (at the beginning of a paragraph) to add aesthetic flair. For any text-based design, like a magazine article on Egypt, this might add interest.

The font itself is a basic sans serif, closely resembling Impact, with a hand-drawn strip of hieroglyphs and a bust of the Jackal-god Anubis. The contrast between the clean-cut, simplistic design of the serif and the more complex, hand-drawn feel of the graphic give the font interest and style.

I feel that the quality of the font, overall, is fair. It is by no means revolutionary, but for the purpose it was designed for, it works well.