Characters

Project 1: Characters
Three weeks

In this project we will not exactly work with typography, or lettering, or a typeface, but with something more elementary, more fundamental: characters. Letters or symbols that are printed or written (or, of course, illuminated or projected, on screens). Characters are the raw materials of words, of sentences, of visual communication. As Thomas Phinney, CEO of FontLab, puts it, “A character is the smallest component of written language that has semantic value.” They are composed by us, using their inherent semantic meaning to form further, more complex meanings, but they also often come pre-loaded with semiotic meanings in and of themselves. In other words, characters that are generally understood to mean one thing (semantic), are often interpreted in a given context as something else entirely (semiotic).

These meanings are often ascribed historically and become established through use. But they also attain culturally specific meaning relating to use and association. The visual representation of characters (“glyphs,” in type design terms) add further complexity to characters: how they are designed adds a level of subjectivity to these ostensibly objective shapes. Their apparent black-and-white authority is of course consistently challenged, undermined, and altered, through inventive construction (emoticons) and to articulate complex ideas succinctly, such as conditions ($), authority (©) or warnings (!).

For one half of this project, we’re going to specifically focus on non-alphanumeric characters and, at least for our primary project focus, ignore A–Z and 0–9. The Unicode Consortium, a Mountain View, CA, non-profit that develops and maintains international standards and data relating to text in software, provides a helpful, if daunting, guide for us. Their Unicode Standard assigns a unique number to every single character, no matter what platform, device, application, or language. As of March 2019 their most recent version, Unicode 12.0, contains 137,928 characters covering 150 modern and historic scripts, as well as multiple symbol sets and emoji. There’s an admirable activist aspect to Unicode: their simple self-described mission is that “Everyone in the world should be able to use their own language on phones and computers.” It’s serious work: many languages are at risk of dying out, and without representation in our primary contemporary communication tools (keyboards) and mediums (text), they are all the more vulnerable to extinction. 

The Consortium has gained a wider public recognition in recent years thanks to emoji being included in their scope: yep, they’re the people who decreed that Yawning Face, Falafel (finally!), and Drop of Blood (?) should be among the 61 new emoji added to Unicode 12.0, coming soon to a phone keyboard near you (iOS 13 will launch with them this September, for example, as Apple announced on World Emoji Day—it’s a thing—this past July 17). Importantly, just like Unicode’s mission, the continuous expansion of emoji also represents efforts for greater human representation within universal communication, even if it’s often WAY overdue: this year not only sees additions of people in wheelchairs, with a cane, or hearing aids as part of the mix, but will also allow the option to change skin tones for people holding hands.

Having said this, in addition to our non-alphanumeric character rule, we’re also going to say no emoji characters for at least the first half of our assignment focus and keep it purely type-based, not pictorial. I know not all emoji are pictographic, so feel free to make an argument for something if you think you have a case.

As for the other half of the project, a speculative future character that doesn’t yet exist: an emoji may or may not be the most appropriate way of articulating the idea, principle, or emotion that you're trying to communicate. In this part of the project, you can move into the potentially more illustrative, pictographic realm of type and typography if you wish.