Abstract : This design research is about language diversity and identity, studied and absorbed through vision and typography.
The aim is to understand how cultural diversity can be present in typography and how it can guide designers in understanding an equal treatment of multi-lingual printed and digitally set material in text formats; to see if a language has a visual identity and how languages are different in visual terms.
The call for equality – as we are different but we should be treated the same – is tackled from a typographic design approach, focussing on the language diversity by means of character use and linguistic specificities to be represented. The intention is to treat every language with its according identity in the most respectful way.
The visual identity of a language is defined by the letter frequency, which is the characterising feature of every language within a text. This is translated into an abstract pattern, built on these specific linguistic parameters and expressing a black and white relationship which gives a variable blackness perception according to the language.
The visualisation is looked from typography, that is the visual form of a language in the sense of placing the linguistic elements in a page and handling the white space according to the black textual elements e.g., the leading. The abstraction of the text into an image, as it is a common visual language, makes possible the visual comprehension of the language and introduces the necessary familiarity in order to make a typography in respect of the language nature and diversity.
To sum up, design choices are made by looking and comparing the images representative of the visual identity of a language, introducing a language-based typography, where typography has to be variable in relation to the language and not only to a standard typeset, because every language brings a perceptual diversity, hence the language can be a typographic design parameter.
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If you want to cite this thesis in your own thesis, paper, or report, use this format (APA):
Guidotti, M. (2021). Uppercase 3.7 % / lowercase 96.3 % / ascenders or descenders 37.0 % / diacritics 0.0 % (The visual identity of a language) .
Unpublished thesis, Hogeschool PXL, PXL-MAD.
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