Graphic Stories Cyprus invited all the creative people to take part in the 2nd international poster contest titled “Writing: The Origins of Civilisation” and to see their work printed, by creating their own postcard.

The international contest was part of the 4th Conference on Graphic Design and Visual Communication in Cyprus that took place on 9-11 of March 2018, in Nicosia.

Few of the achievements of human wisdom can be compared to the creation of writing. This wisdom, which separated him from the rest of the living beings on the planet, began to transform his environment creating civilization, in its modern sense, around 5000 BC. when the first real writing was invented.

With the term “writing” we mean the activity in which the content of a linguistic expression is encoded in such a way that another reader can rebuild, with a relative degree of accuracy, the precise phrase that has been written. While from this point of view in the earlier first scriptures, the non-encoding of grammatical words made it very difficult or even impossible to reconstruct the exact meaning sought by the author, the great leap in the evolution of writing was achieved around the 8th century BC. by the ancient Greeks, who based on the Phoenician writing of the time, created the first real alphabet. Symbols, ideograms and images have given their place to the letters. Thought and speech converted to writing and the abstract gained substance. The sounds, the phonemes, the consonants, and the vowels of speech were codified, acquired form and imprinted by every means as a bequest for the next generations.

The theme of the contest, “Writing, the origins of Civilisation”, and the corresponding exhibition aim to highlight and promot the importance of writing in relation to culture, literature and arts, both locally and globally, as well as the importance in the evolution and future development of humankind.

The creatives participating in the contest are invited to visualize their thoughts and ideas in relation to the contribution of writing in the creation of each and any civilisation and the role it has played in its development.