eps51.com
Bi-Scriptual – Designing with multiple script systems
Typo Berlin 2017
by Ben Wittner from Eps15
“To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries”
- Ben Wittner
Ben opened his talk with the this vastly encompassing statement, his approach to design takes the road that all designers should travel, one of exploration and eternal learning.
Ben Wittner and Sascha Thoma founded Eps15 in 2008, but years before that on an exchange in Cairo they quickly discovered they were not receiving the stimulus with their host university that they were accustomed to.
Deciding to focus their energy on self initiated project they began to notice the use of bi-scripts in typography throughout the city, not to be confused with bi-lingual, bi-script typography communicates the same information in two difference scripts, for example, latin character sets used in english together with Arabic characters.
By studying the forms they found in Cairo’s street vernacular typography, they studied the shapes of the scripts they found, paying particular attention to the relationship between the latin and arabic scripts which could be formed by a number of factors, but most cohesively by adjusting the stress in the characters and creating a layout in which they could balance in harmony.
This project stayed on with Ben Wittner and Sascha Thoma well after leaving Cairo, the relationship of two scripts existing together in harmony without a hierarchy became an area of exploration and passion, metaphorically encompassing social cohesion and unity of cultures in an idealised global society.
Eventually leading to their teachings and the book ‘Bi—Scriptual’:
Fons Hickmann asked us to give a course at the University of the Arts in Berlin about Multilingual Editorial Design.
Our main project was to create a publication on the topic «Bi—Scriptual». We asked the students to find a designer or studio working with both Latin and non-Latin script and type — and interview them about the challenges of combining different scripts with varying visual precepts and habits. Each article was to be set bilingual — the designers’ mother tongue and English.
Source: https://www.eps51.com/projects/bi-scriptual/
They emphasize that the project is not about creating a book which features two scripts, ie one at the front and one at the back, but instead having them exist in unison together, optimally without hierarchy given to a specific script.
For me this project really touched home, it encompasses my views on the world and embracing our newly globalized world as a larger community, one where borders are can be transcended through the vast amount of information available and access to communication which is continually expanding, but also to skew away from english / Euro-centric design and forming relationships with broader groups and cultures that existing within our community which can be overlooked by western design.
This talk was the highlight of Typo Berlin for me, the ideas presented will continue with me for sometime, thank you to Ben Wittner and Sascha Thoma.
