 Well, you can totally hear me. I'm a J, and I'm a designer from the Caribbean. I'm from Trinidad, which is here. And I practice design for about 12 years back at home. And I think I could definitely now say that I am, for sure, a typeface designer as well. And when I graduated from the Cooper Union in 2017, I knew that the kind of work that I wanted to do was in Latin type, because that's the writing system I have a relationship with. But I also knew that I was really interested in African scripts. And not just because here I am, a black guy drawing type, but because I wanted to learn more about how these fonts are supported and how they were represented in the industry. And big surprise, there's a lot more support for typefaces or for languages that exist in so-called developed spaces than there are in incidentally poor black and brown spaces. And that's kind of obvious why. I mean, type drives trade, right? But I felt like what I really wanted to do was become part of this movement that is kind of happening right now. So there's fonts like Jamer Patel's Kegelia, which I think is one of the most important typefaces ever, and Google Fonts Noto, which are all trying to do a little bit more support for these. And I really felt like, yeah, I want to be a part of that. And I ended up, in my research, a lot closer to home than I expected. This is Surinam, which you can see is pretty close to Trinidad. And I was trying to head over to the Eastern Hemisphere. And Surinam is a country that's located pretty close to us by boat or by plane. But they have a similar history in terms of they have colonialization, they had slavery. But unlike Trinidad, Surinam has had successive waves of escaped slaves escaped into the South American rainforest. And I think it's just because the South American rainforest is pretty complex, and it's hard to chase someone inside of there. But what happened is that these people actually started to develop their own societies over a couple hundred years. And I was really interested in just historically these people. But what I learned was that there was one group of people who were relatively unassimilated called Injuka. And Injuka are currently a matriarchal society. Pretty good move. They're still pretty active. So you can learn about them right now. You can Google them. You can learn some of their language. You can learn about some of their culture. And they have a proprietary Creole language. A Creole, just like I use Creole in the linguistic sense, where it's a combination of languages that you then wrap with structure and grammar over years. And they had their own. And they also happened to have the only African writing system that was developed in the Western Hemisphere and in the post-colonial Caribbean. And I figured, well, definitely want to be a part of this. The language that they spoke was mixed between Dutch, English, and African languages. And I wanted to get into the story and the background a little bit. In 1908, an Injuka tribesman named Afaka Atumisi had a dream where God came to him, dressed as a white ghost as he's often want to do. And God told him that his people needed literacy. And over a series of a few days, he outlined a bunch of symbols that was meant to cover all of the sounds in their language. Afaka Atumisi had this for about two years. And on the eve or the night of Haley's Comet, he saw it as a sign. And he decided to start passing it on to his people. And they immediately picked it up, and they began using it. And this went on for a little while. Incidentally, it wasn't used like most languages are primarily for trade, but they started using it for journals, so the recipes, and their gossip, and their prayers. But the script's usage was ultimately doomed. Like most persecuted or formerly persecuted and assimilated people, Afaka's people were really wary of Christianity. And the reality is that Afaka was a Christian convert. The chiefs in his village decided that it was too dangerous to teach a writing system that could potentially be used to pass on Christianity, especially since they had their own religion. And I mean, these are people who 150 years ago ran away from slavery. They don't want to go back. And I think to them, Christianity sounded a little bit like slavery, which, you know. So because of this mixture of religious hesitance and this whole idea of tribal feudalism as well, because Afaka was of a lower class, then the chiefs would make these decisions. The script became eventually less and less and less used. It went on for 40 years, but that was about it. And now, there are about less than 15 users of the script. And I'm one of them, which is very, very crazy. But outside of that, there isn't really a chance for the script to be carried forward. I mean, you can only learn about it in academic journals. The most recent one is probably about 30 years old. But there's also no way to learn it. And I felt like there's a lot more interest in this happening among the people that are currently there and among the Caribbean linguistic community. So I figured, you know, I can make a font, right? I guess. And it's a special challenge a little bit. So what I did was I've referred to the Unicode first, like everybody should do. And what I learned was that Afaka is registered with the Unicode, but it isn't encoded. So there are two pending proposals currently, but it just hasn't been approved. And I kind of wanted to find out why. So I learned that the person who wrote the proposals was Michael Everson, who's done a lot of this type of work for other languages. And it's just like the nicest guy of all time. But the reason that it hasn't been encoded is because the script is registered as defective. Afaka is a syllabary, which means that every sound has to have a corresponding symbol. And as it is right now, because the language evolved a little bit past the written system, there aren't enough symbols to cover all of the sounds. And that means that there's a certain type of ambiguity. So this is a good example. In the written language, this is both in juka and juka. So there's no way to separate that sound that you get at the start. But the translation of in juka is a proud group of people who live on the Tapahone River, who ran away from slavery a couple hundred years ago. And then juka means jushit. And that's not gonna slide, right? So there has to be some way to be able to kind of solve for those problems. But I was initially a little bit suspicious of this idea of defectiveness, because especially in a Western context, because it just felt like an easy hole to poke. So what I did was I started doing a little bit more research and to figure it out. Like, maybe it is that there's some kind of system that we haven't really understood yet. And I think that my research, and then chats with Michael, kind of led to understanding that at the time the script was written, you could figure out what somebody means by the writing. So even if there is ambiguity, you're gonna be able to differentiate, but that would have been fine then, but it's just entirely too inaccessible now for that to be a current system. And the big thing about getting into these kinds of projects when you ask people, I wanna do non-Latin, they tell you like, well, first you need to talk to the native users, and then when you do some more work, consult the native users, and then right as soon as you're about to close up, talk to the native users. And I thought that this was a pretty good move because I wanted to get in touch, so I did, but they didn't know any more about that than I did. Which is a little bit tricky. But there is rules on terms of like, there's an alphabetical order. There are some formalized styles, but then there's some that aren't at all. And Michael was like, well, why don't you just go start drawing and you'll figure it out. And I was like, cool. When I started researching the manuscript, something that came to me pretty early was I realized that there were some manuscripts that looked really kind of like nicer than the other ones. And what I learned was that anthropologists, sometimes, well, no, always, white anthropologists, they would be so fascinated with the work that what they would do is they would add their own little embellishments to the forms and little bellies and little swoops, and I think it's obviously well-intentioned stuff, but I didn't really want to have to find too much of that. And I started sifting, right? So my big thing was at the end of this, if it looks too nice, then it probably just won't, like it probably isn't the right one if it's all super aligned up, and there's also Dutch writing next to it, you know? But yeah, it was hard. Surprise. I figured it would get super easy, but it didn't. I set up a little GitHub repo and I started drawing, but I realized that a big challenge was that some of the forms, just because I don't work in this language, were kind of hard to understand, so I started a little bit from scratch. And the first thing I had to do was kind of figure out how are these things drawn? So I basically started drawing each form by hand and figuring out, okay, which is the fastest way to get this done? That's probably how they would have done it. And then that kind of helps me figure out things like, you know, like stroke modulation and how the contrasts work. And I also knew that if I'm building this font, that I need to be able to work with Latin as well. So there has to be some kind of compliment. And I didn't have my own non-Latin knocking around, so I used SourceSans, which is low contrast. It's open source. So I was able to fork it and make my own modifications. And doing that meant that I had a reference for things like stroke weight and spacing. And it just saved me a lot of head work, ostensibly. There needed to be confirmation on things like relative proportions. There needed to be, I need to say, establish a baseline, for example. And some letters, there is a particular order that somebody letters had around them. And establishing that kind of made things easier as well. There was punctuation. Africa has limited punctuation, but they basically use a vertical bar to indicate the pause. So this pause could either be what we would consider a full stop or a comma. I guess it's really just a contextual thing, but there isn't really a way to differentiate it. There's an exclamation mark, which is that guy over there, which is kind of weird. It doesn't happen everywhere, but it is there for sure. I wonder if they just don't make exclamations very often. There's also this squiggly line, which I thought was some super elite typographic tool that they were using to kind of, this was the answer to solve all of those problems, but it was really just a show the bottom of the page because this was a still developing script, right? And you can kind of map a progress of it over time because you can see this is about 20 years apart, so on the left and on the right. And you can kind of see that there's a certain roughness on the left, and then things get a little bit smoother as it goes along. So these were the kinds of two groups that I was looking at a little bit. There's also Healey's Comet Glyph in this script, and I don't know if you guys have a Healey's Comet Glyph in your font, but you know, work on it. So when I started designing, I knew that my proportions had to be a little bit different to the Latin just because I want this to work next to it and I want people to be able to differentiate them and they are similarities in some of the forms. So in the O, for example, the O in Afaka and the O looks like the O in any geometric sans. The A sound looks a lot like the Latin A, so I wanted to find ways that I could kind of force the differentiation as much as I could. And because this script was in development, there are so many different versions of different symbols that have happened, so what I had to do was kind of log all of them, and that was kind of fun and exciting in some cases and considerably less so in others, because some symbols are just used indiscriminately, some are upside down, some are sideways, so there's a logic that had to kind of be pushed through, but the reality is that this was a script that was still in its developing stages when documented. I'm sure some of the people who were using it didn't know it very well. The three major styles, one of which is the anthropologists' drawing version, some of which are a little bit more faithful than others, and what I decided I couldn't do was ignore anything, so I basically drew them all, but I considered them in the idea of stylistic sets because that's kind of what they are, right? And after a few months, I was able to actually start making sentences and start seeing my way a little bit, but this is nice, this is good for archival stuff, and it's nice for people who might want to check it out, but if this had to be anything more than just a research project, something had to be done about these missing sounds. So some of them are just not reproducible, some of them are used interchangeably, but what I did was I did a Python scrape of the dictionary, there's an online dictionary, and this Python scrape kind of helped me figure out which sounds are really missing and which sounds are halfway accounted for, and the way that this kind of solution usually happens is that some hard-working linguists works with a type designer, and they interface with the community, and then they actually have a collaborative solution for these missing sounds, and I figured, well, that could be kind of cool, we could start looking at that, right? And there's a need for nasal modifiers, for example, so a nasal modifier gets you out of Jewish territory, and what Michael suggested basically was having a dot before character for pre-nasalization and a dot after proposed, but for me, I found that that was fine, but then it kind of got in the way of the texture of reading a little bit, so I figured, well, why not just put it at the top or the bottom, because there aren't any diacritics anyway. Same thing for the O sound, so the O sound has no way to differentiate sometimes between O and O, and I figured, well, why not just add a little bar on top of there or a Macron for the nerds, and then we can end up with actual nuance now, you know? The A and E sounds, they use really interchangeably just like the O and O sounds, but a lot of the A and E sounds are just, there's so many upside-down versions that I figured, well, just flip it for whichever one you don't have, and then we can at least know that, yeah, this is the differentiation, right? Because all I wanted to make sure and do was not make too much modifications to the glyphs that existed. The difference between is and is not in Alcan is differentiated in Latin by an accent, so that's the only way that you know, and in the script, there's no way to differentiate that, so it could be is or is not when it's written, so why not just add an actual accent? This is a language that has roots in Dutch, so why not just refer to those when we're building, right? And same thing, why not use the umlaut or the Dutch terse again for the nerds to help differentiate between the O and O sounds? That can be a pretty quick solution for where there isn't a differentiation, and these are people who are using Latin, definitely in all of their communication, so they should be familiar with diacritics, and if not, it's at least an easy way to implement it, and eventually I was able to start making sentences, and I still think it's pretty imperfect and a little hacky, but it's clearer than it was before now, and it's done now without the alteration of symbols, but just the addition of some diacritics and the rotation of some of the forms. I knew that using this, right, because it's pre-unicode, I had to figure out usability, and usability was a little bit of a challenge for me, and what I figured I could do, because this is the language that is written in Latin, what I could do is write some open type, so what I did was I wrote some open type and a little bit of Python to help me write the open type, but that means that now you can just like switch on discretionary ligatures and just type in Latin and then switch it over to Africa, if you'd like. But this isn't like, I feel like this isn't enough. The big win for this would be getting it encoded, and getting this encoded means that we need to interface with the community directly, so right now there aren't enough users to actively verify it, but I kind of figure that if anybody is to verify it, it should be them over me or anybody else, and I feel like they also deserve to have a certain amount of input on this, because this is part of their legacy. So I used Drawbot again with Python to make some tools, and one of the tools was a little bit of a proof sheet, so I sent them like basically PDFs that we generated that allow them to refer to a shape and say, oh, this is cool, but I also have other shapes next to it, so there's a point of reference as well. And if we're using Python to generate things, and we're using Python's grapes, then we can also make like little flashcards that you can actually use now to learn the language, and this is just a matter of scraping the website that there's a dictionary for, and then using combination of Python for typography and discretionary ligatures to switch over to December. But I also like, I wanted to differentiate the fact that this is a syllabary, so you can kind of read it a little bit easier because each syllable is color-coded a little bit. This is a good time to talk about cultural erasure and colonialization and stuff, but the reality is that this script wasn't diminished by colonialization. If anything, this script is a response to colonialization. It was discontinued a little contentuitively, I think, because they wanted to have their own thing, and I think their own thing to them was just not having a writing system because they didn't want that potential for missionary work, and I think it's also a kind of an active resistance to European imperialism, which is, you know, a good thing to resist, I think. But the times are different now, you know, and I feel like these people have a chance to actually make a decision on this, and this is a pretty important linguistic artifact, if nothing else. So the project is licensed under the OFL, which means that people can fork the project when it's released and they can make their own modifications. I will take pull requests. They could also access the code and do stuff like this on their own, and it's free, and it's for public modification and use. I feel like it is no way to deny that what we do is service capitalism. I mean, if we're thinking that we're not, we're lying to ourselves, right? But I also think that it's fine to admit with that acknowledgement comes a certain ability to make change, and I'm not saying that we should leave here and we should start charities or anything like that, but I'm saying that some work won't get done unless somebody does it. Toni Morrison said that you should draw the fonts that you want to see in the world. She did. No, she did. She said that you should write the books that haven't been written if you want to read them, and I mean, that is basically what I tried to take from it myself. I feel like one of the ways that the developed world can offset the massive cost of its advancement to everybody else is to try and find ways that it can include cultures that may have been swept under the rug or very forcibly erased. And if you're a typeface designer, why not let that be a font? Maybe your next font could support some kind of underrepresented script. Maybe you can help someone send a message in their own language, which is a really special thing. And I think it's a really good test of your skill and it would be a good test of your sanity and it would be a good test of how far you really want to take this type design thing, but I think everybody should try it a little bit at least once. So I think my closer with this is what everybody here, which is what are you going to make? Thank you.