the language's visual identity
Description
This typographic design research is about language and cultural identity. Here it is studied and absorbed the visual language that typography holds. It resulted in innovative book concepts (with strong foundations in a systematic method for visual analysis) that expressed visually the multilingual use in editorial design.
In the Latin script context, we are dealing with a heterogeneous mass of languages and related writing cultures. Despite the script being the same, every language has a different usage expressed in the set of characters and letters frequency. To have an understanding of which are these letters, it has been introduced a classification and measuring system based on the location of the letters in the text line, defining them as:
(TOP) uppercase, ascenders, above diacritics,
(MIDDLE) middle diacritics,
(BOTTOM) descenders, below diacritics.
Because of the different amount (frequency) of these letters; each language introduces its unique way of shaping text on the page, influencing the typographic “color of the text” or texture (the visual - black/white - perception of a text at the reading size). In that sense typography is the visual form of the language and the cradle of cultural heritage, expressed by its diversity.
Four books visualize the identity of: Czech, English, German, Polish – chosen for their extreme diversity relative to the language parameters considered in this research – within a shared multilingual document: The Universal Declaration of the Human Rights. The letters frequency is translated into a black and white pattern, in a visual comprehension of the language as a (blackness) quantity.
A tool book defines how to set typography (the leading) in relation to the visual identity of each language, pursuing a black/white balance. By questioning the design standard deviations, it introduces an equal and diversified (multilingual) typography, expressive of cultural diversity.
