| Beschreibung |
The world is increasingly networked and globalised. During their studies, our students reach a certain level of expertise in typographic design, but usually only within their own language area. Some, especially those who travel (either on their own, or under exchange situations) gain some proficiency with one or perhaps two additional languages. Such additional proficiencies, however, remain almost always within the same alphabet system, i.e.: the Latin alphabet.
The goal of this project is to prepare students for (typo)graphic communication outside their “comfort zoneâ€, i.e. in languages and alphabetic systems with which they are not familiar. To help reach this goal, it is planned to invite several people in the field of typographic design, each with significant experience in a language and/or alphabetic system other than that with which most students are familiar. For example, Shoko Mugikura will present and discuss the Japanese language, which uses three separate alphabetic systems: Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. These three alphabetic systems are set sometimes vertically, running from top to bottom and right to left, as with Chinese, sometimes from left to right and top to bottom, as with European languages. Both methods are often even used together in the same piece, such as maps. It is planned to invite several other guests to talk about European languages, Arabic and Cyrillic scripts, and oriental scripts and setting systems.
While I do not want to fix results in advance, the broad intention is to increase awareness among students of the multitude of alphabetic systems around the world, and to give them a starting point for future explorations in this area, should their interest be piqued.
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