HOW TO DO NEOGRAPHY WELL
Step 1: Base lines.
Aka guidelines. Just do an unfilled rectangle and stack it on itself twice.
Step 2: Basic calligraphy
Choose your brush. Different brush shapes have different dynamics, and different dynamics will wield different results on paper.
Best experienced on actual paper, for digital programs cannot give you the exact right feel of drag when you try to do wrong strokes. Usually, if you write by hand on paper, and it's feeling effortless, then you're doing it right.
Cheat sheet for brush tips of different kinds:
Step 3: The execution
You might want to try asemic writing at first, or take inspiration from other writing systems that already exist. Know that it is nigh impossible to create something that never existed before, for your writing system will always bear similarity to at least a dozen others.
There are multiple methods of making scripts,
Engineered
You set up a goal and plan things up before setting up the canons. Usually used for featural scripts.
Post-asemic
Make an asemic array of symbols and assign them Latin equivalents.
Monogramic
Make a monogram - some complex symbol with lots of strokes - and break it into lesser shapes erasing some of the original strokes. Similar to the Combinatorics method. Example below:
Combinatoric
Make particles, combine in different ways. See below:
Natural evolution simulation
Following the pipeline "pictogram" -> "letter". As seen below:
Other useful tips:
Omniglot.com: go there and take a look at how many writing systems are there in the world. This site stores lots of conscripts as well, and you can submit yours if you want to!
r/neography is a huge subreddit that has everything about neography (aka the art of creating new writing systems).
Learn about what kinds of writing systems there are. Basically they are categorized by how much information a symbol carries. It could be one sound, a syllable, or whole words. Though there are nuances, explained on r/neography's wiki, by the way.
Practice. Doodle a lot. You will get the grip of it eventually.
There are 26 letters in the English alphabet. The middle is between M and N, as M is letter #13. If you include numerals, that's 36 symbols. If you include punctuation, that's about 48 symbols depending on how much punctuation you want.
I have a sideblog called @thecrazyneographist meant just for neography, and all the scripts posted there are free to use per request!
Have fun :D












