While I was away at GenCon, Apex Book Company posted the next installment of my series on creating an alien language. This installment was a lot of fun to write, because I addressed the difference between creating an alien alphabet and designing a font, in addition to quite a few resources that you might be interested in checking out.

Part of the goal behind writing this post, is that people tend to confuse an alien font with a fully-develope alien language.

Here’s a quote from the article:

in many ways, your alien alphabet is a complex key that will serve as the building blocks for everything else you will do. Keep in mind that the order of the letters, symbols and numbers may or may not matter to you. The English alphabet, for example, doesn’t mean anything semantically when you put the letters in their proper order. The alphabet only becomes a crucial part of a language when you identify what the letters represent, combine them into words, or rank these words in alphabetical order. As a result, you have a built-in system to place permutations of letters, phrases and sentences into lists.

So, the first thing I’d like you to consider is to ask yourself if you know what an alphabet is. Well, I can tell you what it isn’t – it’s not a font! –SOURCE: Creating an Alien Language: What’s in an Alien Alphabet?

The article is really in-depth this time around, so if you have an interest in the topic be sure to check out Creating an Alien Language: What’s in an Alien Alphabet? on the Apex Book Company Blog.