thesis
The relationship between ciphers and typography
The development of society brings a steady emergence of new signs and cyphers. These signs come in many forms - from cave drawings to natural and artificial languages or from arts to computer generated codes.
My Thesis aims to give a summary of cypher use and classical cryptography. The main goal is to map out cyphers and their meaning while presenting the various structural possibilities and solutions cryptography has come up with. I’m looking to pinpoint the events that transformed conventional typographical elements into the abstract characters we see today. In the first half of the thesis, I explain cryptography in theory and show it in practice. This serves as the foundation for understanding this complex topic. Then I explore the various techniques of cryptography in detail. These steps are necessary to achieve our main goal. The findings of my research show that cryptographers in the middle and early modern ages thought cryptic texts written with abstract characters prove to be a bigger challenge to crack than texts written in conventional letters and numbers. This was indeed the case with certain methods; however, other methods only gave an illusion of complexity.