 Before we get started, I started off the presentation with this world map for a specific reason. And the reason is I wanted to ask you guys all a question. And that question is, how many, what percentage roughly in your mind of places or countries on this map use western alphabets or writing systems versus non-western? Any guesses? No guesses? 25%? 25% what? 25% western? Versus 75% non-western? Just, no. Just a really rough estimate of how many places where it's official that it's used, whether it's used western typography or western writing systems versus non-western writing systems. So I have 25% western versus 75% non-western. Any other different guesses? 40% 90% 40% 50% Hand in language, interacted with one another and bring out the feeling of what what the meaning is, of what is being said. So since language is the most important thing here, we want to convey language through typography. It's important to keep in mind who speaks what languages, but in the context of typography, what do people write with? because everybody speaks a different language, but everybody speaks in a certain way. But how do people actually write it and convey it in a non-oral way? So this is where typography comes in. So here is the world map again, with a big chunk of it taken out. And this map, can anyone tell me what this map represents in the context of that first map I showed you? Is it for the U.C. team? Correct, yeah. Yeah, it's pretty self-explanatory. So all the gray countries, all the gray here is countries that use Latin scripts, so ABCs. The exceptions here are the dark color up there, which is Cyrillic scripts, which is Russian and Ukrainian and Bulgarian and all the Eastern European languages, Slavic rather, and the blue is Greek. So these are what are considered Western scripts, so originating in Europe and eventually spread because of a variety of reasons, colonization, which is why you see Africa and South America and Australia and Indonesia using mostly, or using Western scripts. Now that big chunk of the map that is cut out is shown here. And these are the countries of the world that do not use Western scripts. These are the countries that use their own native scripts or scripts that have been tossed around across the geography here, shown here. So the green is Arabic-derived scripts, so you can see North Africa, Iran, Lebanon, and the Levant region over there for the Mediterranean, as well as Afghanistan and Pakistan, which use Arabic-derived script. Then you see India, which is shown as orange and red. I think it's an oversimplification of the level of diversity in scripts here. But basically, India has its own script systems, which are just simplified for the sake of this map. Then you see the big red is China, and then Korean is different. I'm assuming people ever know those or everything else, but Korea, Japan, Southeast Asia is the same color as this because all these scripts come from India originally, the same with Java. And the oblires here are really Amharic, which is in Ethiopia, and Armenian, and Georgian, which are not really spoken by too many people. So those are non-Western scripts. This map, in particular, is extremely important because of the following reasons, and this is where I will answer the question that I posed to you guys in the beginning. This map is important because the countries of non-Western scripts represent approximately 50% of the world's population. That's weighed in heavily by India and China, obviously. But even when you have other countries like Thailand, which are not really that high in population compared to India and China. Anyway, so the map here represents 50% of the world's population, and if you look in comparison to the map before, landmass-wise, it's only about a third of the landmass approximately. That represents 50% of the world's population. And these countries represent 85% of the world's major writing system. So there's thousands of writing systems out there, like smaller languages in Africa and Australia and South America, but we're focusing on the major ones here. These countries in Asia and Africa and the Middle East represent 85% of the world's writing systems. But here's the kicker, and here's the thing that makes this topic the most important of all. And this is a totally unscientific estimate, but anyone that researches this on their own will probably come to a similar conclusion, if not the same, that with 85% of the world's writing systems, these languages in total contribute only about 10% of the world's total typefaces. So clearly, there's a huge deficit in the number of typefaces that are available for these languages or have been developed for these languages versus the percentage of the world that these languages occupy or the percentage of the world that these writing systems occupy. So the other important things here that make this particular region of the world most important in terms of typography is that these countries represent huge emerging markets, which again is weighed in heavily by India and China, but certainly also by the countries of Southeast Asia and developed economies like Japan, as well as some of the development that's happening in the Middle East. Really, it's India and China that are really the anchor weights of the countries that are representing 85% of the world's writing systems. It's kind of a mumble jumble of words there, but I hope you get the point. Since they're huge emerging markets, that means there's going to be increasing influence. That means these countries are going to be having a bigger say in the world's affairs as they already are. Obviously, China and India are. And that means that there's going to be differences and improvements and changes in social economic development. And as soon as increasing influence in social economic development and changes in economic booms and all this stuff happens, there's always an increase in need for all types of different services. One of them being designed and within design typography, which is such a core concept, such a core aspect of language and how language is disseminated throughout these places. What does all this mean? This means that we're just getting started in these parts and in this part of the world. These countries, like I said, they only represent less than 10% or less of the world's typefaces. So typography, in the context of typography, we've barely scratched the surface of what's possible and what kind of creativity we can dive into and what types of applicable typefaces we can design or how we can apply typography for society and a variety of other different things. And that's why this call, this talk, is called Type of the Rest of the World. And that's a picture that I took in Dubai, actually. I was trying to represent the increase in development and these sorts of things. What we'll do, basically, for the talk is I'll go through three mini case studies of three very typographically influential scripts that are non-Western. So the whole point of this talk is to dive into non-Western scripts. So we'll do three of them and then we'll do a little bit on Indian typography as well. So the first one we'll dive into is Arabic. And like I said earlier, Arabic includes, in the context of typography, Arabic includes Persian, Urdu. It also includes a bunch of other languages that like Sindhi, for instance, and Pashto and Jawi, which is used in Malaysia and Indonesia for official types of things. But Arabic is an interesting script because I think it's probably one of the most different that you can get from Western type, from the ABCs, just in terms of how it's structured and how it operates. So it's got a very long illustrious history. It's religiously very important because of the Quran, which is read by 1.2 billion Muslims. So here, the next slide showcases a quick snapshot of a font called Wadi, which was developed by Dina Mehrhedge, who is a designer from the UK. This font particularly characterizes some very key elements in Arabic. One very key element in Arabic, which is the tips of each letter. So each letter has different tips based on where it is in the alphabet. That's just to kind of get us started. But the characteristics really of Arabic are, it's a right to left language. So you read it from right to left. The letters flow together. So if you're writing cursive in English, Arabic is by default cursive. It's always cursive. So every time you look at an interaction with one letter with another, it has to physically join, unlike English, where as you can see, obviously the letters don't necessarily join unless you're writing in cursive. And this is really key here. So each Arabic letter has three positions, depending on where it is positioned in a word. So what's an Arabic word? Like the word could on, for instance. The q, the q in the beginning, looks different in the beginning of that word. For example, if that word was bukran, then the q in the middle of the word would look different. I should actually have some examples of that coming up. But the letters look different based on where it is. So each time you design a letter, you have to design it three times, because of the beginning and the middle in the end. So it's the initial, medial, and final positions of each letter. So this is an exploration of Arabic type by a Jordanian visual artist named Ahmad Sabah. And it gives us a feel for how the language operates. And this is more of a ornamental, fun way of looking at it. You can see the language has a very horizontal focus. So in English, from Western scripts, you can see our kind of tall A's and B's and the things are vertically aligned, even though it reads horizontally. But Arabic script is very horizontally based. This one, you can see each letter kind of, and because of the horizontal alignment of Arabic, where you have that focus, you can manipulate the letters to match kind of a grid as this guy has done here. This is a picture that I took of some graffiti that I saw in Berlin, Germany. So this is interesting because, well, not only because of the political statements that I think it's making, because of this happened right after the Arab Spring and all that stuff in Egypt. So Tahrir Square, if you guys don't know, is where the whole Arab Spring Revolution is a symbolic place for the entire revolution in Egypt. This is stencil art, so someone's pretty painted through with stencils. But the interesting thing here is that the English writing here is written in Helvetica, which, if you know anything about typography, Helvetica is kind of like the most ubiquitous font that you see all over the place. If I just look around here, I see Helvetica on this computer right now. I see Helvetica. Microsoft's logos in Helvetica. Microsoft's, yeah, exactly, yeah. Microsoft's logos in Helvetica. There you go. Many logos are in Helvetica. I think last time she did a Helvetica versus aerial quiz for everyone. But the interesting thing here is that the Arabic is also in Helvetica because there was a Helvetica that was developed for Arabic, which matches the English Helvetica. So it kind of takes the same characteristics of Helvetica and applies it to Arabic, which is very clean lines, very elimination of BS, if you will. And you can see kind of how the Arabic script matches the English script for this particular example. But the point here is that Arabic has been an interesting case because there's been a lot of Western scripts, Western typefaces, which have been adapted for Arabic. So Helvetica's not the only one. There's been Universe, Palatino, and Frutiger as well. Frutiger is a really important one that was designed in, I believe, the 60s or 70s when Paris Airport was looking for new signage. So they commissioned an entirely new font just for that. And that's been translated into Arabic. I believe some airports in the Middle East right now use Frutiger as well. But this is Helvetica in both languages. This one is an interesting example. This is basically a tourist guide for Arabs who are visiting the Netherlands. And it's entirely in Arabic. And it's called Shemal Nour. And it was developed by a collaboration between Dutch and Arabic designers from Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East. And it was developed on the Federer stanz model. Federer stanz is another very important Latin or Western typeface. So that's been adapted into Arabic for this. And there is a typographic matchmaking project that was done between 10 Dutch and Arab designers to develop this sort of thing. I mean, this is just an example of how similar typography in different cultures can bridge the gap and get people to, for example, in this case, get Arabs to know more about it. It exposes Arabs to different aspects of the Netherlands by adapting Dutch typeface to the language of the people who are going to be reading this, in this case, Arabic. This one is another one just from Dubai. Another example of just how Arabic has been adapted towards Western typefaces. This is just falafel, which I think is opening in India soon. But it's a falafel joint. They're a chain across the Middle East, and they have some other branches as well. But basically, this is in Dubai, where you can see how the Arabic type has been adjusted to fit the English type. And the reason why, and you might be noticing a trend, that the Arabic type usually adjusts to fit the Western type. That's just because Western type has been around for much longer, and there's far more examples that you can adjust the Arabic type to for Western type. This, I thought was interesting, these are obviously major Western brands that have been given Arabic Arabization, if you will, of their logos and the typefaces of their logos. So you can see how, for example, in diesel, it's very tall. But they've adjusted the Arabic type, so that all is also tall. And you can see this one, for example, there's serifs that they've added on. Serifs, meaning the little tips at the end of each letter, have been added on to the letters in Arabic, which Arabic letters don't naturally have that at all. And Paul Smith at the bottom has been a cursive thing, so this one is probably the easiest one to do. It's because Arabic is naturally cursive. So that's just a little bit about Arabic. We can go on for hours, but this is just a quick overview. The next one we'll go on to is Chinese. And Chinese is particularly interesting because of a variety of reasons. And just like Arabic, it's extremely, extremely different from both Western type. But in terms of the language itself, it's completely different than any other language out there just because of the way that it's structured. So some characteristics of Chinese are that you can read it right to left, left to right, and top to bottom. So you could read it any which way you want. And the reason for that is because it uses characters. So there's no letters in Chinese. You can't read something out by sounding out what each letter sounds like. You just have to memorize the characters, rather. That's what enables it the flexibility of being able to read in whatever direction you want, basically. Has anyone here been to China? OK. So you probably, if you've been to any of the historic sites there, you'll notice that, and if you were noticing the language, you'll notice that the writing on the old palaces and old famous buildings are written from right to left. So traditional royal things are written from right to left. Nowadays, mostly it's left to right just because of, just to make it easier for everyone because people are learning English as well. But top to bottom is something that you'll see a lot in newspapers. So that's very interesting for Chinese. And in terms of characters, there's 5,000 characters that you have to know if you want to read like a basic newspaper that you just have to memorize. And these can be extremely complicated. So it's a huge task. I studied Chinese for three years, and it wasn't easy. But in reality, there's well over 25,000 characters in Chinese. So when you're designing type for Chinese, you're going to really just aim for the first 5,000 because most of the remaining 20,000 are either obsolete or used in very artistic cases or poems or things like that. The other interesting thing about Chinese is even though it's very complicated, it's also very simple in a weird way. Like all Chinese characters use the same set of strokes. So there's a set of like nine, I forget exactly how many there are, but there's a set of nine strokes that will say every single character in Chinese is a combination of some kind of those nine strokes. So in that sense, it makes designing Chinese type very easy. Feel like you do just these nine things and you're all set. So we'll dive into a couple of the examples of Chinese here. So this is a picture I took in Hong Kong at the Sanyat Sen Museum. You'll see Optima Sands as the typeface on the bottom for English, which kind of conveys a important regal feel without the use of Sarah. But in Chinese, however, you don't see the Chinese type being adjusted towards the Western type. You see the Chinese type using traditional Chinese characters. And the other thing that I forgot to mention is that they're simplified and traditional characters in Chinese. So simplified characters were ones that Chinese government implemented in the 50s or 60s to improve literacy across China. But in Hong Kong and Taiwan and by overseas Chinese communities, they used the traditional, sorry, and these are traditional characters. So these kind of have a calligraphic tone to them. It should also be noted that Chinese, I think the Chinese were probably the first real typographers because they invented woodblock printing on cloths back in like the second century BC. Far before the West even developed such things. It's funny that you don't hear about these things because 90% of the world's typefaces are Western, so you only really get to focus on those. But this is one example. I had to get a SIM card when I was in Hong Kong and this is an example of how Helvetica, you can see the English is in Helvetica, and the numbers are obviously in Helvetica. But this is how, just an example of how the Chinese text has been aligned to fit the English here. And the other interesting thing about Chinese is since it's based on characters and not letters, each character has one block space, so every single character takes up the same amount of space. So if you notice in Western type, or in type of most other languages actually, each letter will take up a different amount of space and W obviously takes up more space than an I. And in Chinese they are all the same size, regardless of how complicated or how simple they are. This next example, this is an interesting experiment by a Tao Chen, who's a designer in China, who did a gothic Chinese typeface. So gothic, so this style of lettering you might see in Western type on the titles of newspapers and that sort of thing. It's originally was called black letter, so this designer wanted to translate that over to the Chinese context. It's just, I just thought this was an interesting example of how you bridge different cultural roots, because black letter was one of the first Western style typefaces ever. So bridging that with Chinese, which has a far longer type of tradition was an interesting exercise, I thought. I just throw that in there. And also you can see that there's ABCs at the bottom too. And those set of characters are just, let's see, I believe this is just a description, it's not really saying anything, but the first, I think it's gothic, yeah. So the first three characters up here spell gothic. The first three characters up here spell gothic. This image was taken in Singapore, in Chinatown, which is I think the only area of the city where you'll see street signs entirely, or street signs in Chinese as well. I don't know, do you know the name of the Western font here? It's a pretty common one, actually. Exotic, exotic, exotic. Well, anyway, I just thought you see this quite a few places, actually, this Western font, at least I have. I think it's on signage, I think, but maybe. Yeah. But the interesting thing here is that that's, effectively, if you want to break it down, that's a sans serif. So there's no little tips at the end of the letters, but in Chinese, at the bottom, it's a serif font, which means that there's little, you see these little tips here, and this really, if this was a sans serif, it would just be a straight line, but there's little tips here, and it's sort of the same purpose as it does in Western type faces, which is to increase legibility, and given that this is a street sign, I think that makes sense. A similar example is this is in the Hong Kong MTR, effectively the Hong Kong Metro, where they use myriad pro, which is the same font that Apple uses for the English, or for the Western script, but they use a serif Chinese font for the Chinese names of the places. And I think that might have to do with the complex, since Hong Kong uses traditional characters, there's far more strokes and far more publications in the letters, or each of the characters, so using a serif in this context will probably make it easier for people to read each character. So each stroke or sound? No, okay, so each character represents one syllable. Oh, okay. Yeah, so for example here, it's yao ma te, that's yao, that's ma, that's te. Okay, but something like Prince Edward, how would they... What about Jordan? So they have different names, they'll have their own names for, I don't know what the Jordan one is, but... So it would probably be yao ma te. Maybe, yeah. Is there a big Jordan? Okay. Maybe, yeah. No, that's like an actual thing, that's probably what it is, but... Yeah, I mean, a lot of people also would call it yao ma te in the US, call themselves Jordan. Okay, yeah, that makes sense. Prince Edward is tai zi, so... It's probably a translation instead of a translation. Yeah, there's a direct translation. For like Starbucks coffee, for instance, in China is xing ba ke, which means xing means star, and ba ke is just the transliteration of bucks. So yeah. So Chinese is interesting, Chinese is very interesting in that way. So I mean, like here, like East, Tsim Sha Tsui, for instance, I mean, it's only two characters. That's because Tsim Sha Tsui here is that Tsim, that's Sha Tsui, but when there's long words like that, they'll just shorten it down to one character, which represents the whole thing, so the Tsim, Tsim Tong, is what that says. This was in Cantonese, so it's a little bit different how they pronounce it, but the writing is the same. So is it that they have a single word, or is it with every other word in it? I mean, they were originally idiomatic, right? So they basically drew everything as a little picture. So there was a picture for the bird, and there was a picture for the house, and a picture for the river, and then you put two pictures together and they made a more complex word. Okay, perfect. Now it's just become letters, but people recognize it mostly it's the sound, which kind of sounds like the original word which it represented many, many years ago. Like when I was in Chinese class, I was asked to choose a Chinese name, and I could choose several of them because of just how I wanted them to sound and as well as what I wanted the characters to represent. So Chinese is interesting because there's just a ton of, there's a ton of English, 5,000, 25,000 characters, but the number of sounds is very limited. I forget exactly, I don't know, you might know this picture, but there's a very small number of, there's just a bunch of repetitive sounds because it's a tonal language, so there's four tones. Sorry? Yeah, well, yeah, it can be very hard to speak. Like for the word for India in Chinese, 印度, and you have to say it like that or else it'll have a different meaning. So, and like Bangalore is Banjialuo, or Banjialuo, I believe it's something like that. So it's, and the characters will have an associated meaning as well. So, and then there's some characters which are meant for usage in foreign words. So like the word for Delhi is the, and both of those characters for Delhi are, you'd only see that, I mean, you'd see that in other words that have a D-E in English. So you'll say the, like I'm trying to think of, another example, I can't think of one or I'll stop my head, but. What's that word? Yeah, maybe. For Denver there would be a syllable that's associated with it. So it'd be like a then, so like then would probably be the associated word. And then there's some words which are just totally different. Like San Francisco is Jiujin Shan, which means Old Gold Mountain because that represents when the Chinese immigrated to the U.S. back in, for the Gold Rush back in the 1800s. So. Yeah. How do the characters actually unique the tone? The characters don't. You just have to know. Oh. Yeah, yeah, literally. So which is why it's just extremely different. It can be very difficult, but like learning the language itself is actually, I found it kind of easy because there's no verb conjugations, there's no, it's very, very simple. So if you say, you don't have to say, I will be going to Microsoft. You can just say, I go to Microsoft or I will go to Microsoft and that's, and there's no two. So it's just like, I go Microsoft. So it's like, it's very simple in that sense. So. So it was basically like I made this thing and this means that we have to follow it. Yeah. Yeah, basically. Someone needed to be positive. Yeah. So yeah, Chinese, I mean, you can go on for hours talking about Chinese because it's probably one of the most interesting and complicated and complex systems out there. Both linguistically and written-wise. And the other interesting thing about Chinese is that the writing takes, the writing, there's a very, very heavy emphasis on the writing. So there's very heavy emphasis on the type, there's very heavy emphasis on the color of your feet, which is far exceeds the emphasis on the speaking just because there's so many, there's so many characters and there's so many meetings that you can pull out of each character. Well, that's not true. There are so many meetings that you can make with a combination of many characters, even though speaking, they might also sound the same. So we can go on with this for a long time. But so that was just kind of a quick overview, just a super quick overview of Chinese. I totally didn't do it justice because just judging by the questions that people are asking. But the next thing I wanted to jump into was Thai, which I think is particularly interesting because of A, here in India, it comes from the Brahmi script. So it's essentially an Indic script. So it's closely related to the Indian writing systems. And it's extremely translatable when you're trying to bridge Western typography with Thai typography or with the foreign, with the non-Western type. Few languages come as close to Thai in making it look very similar. Now, you'll see some examples going forward. So some of the characteristics of the language are left to right, so it's right just like English or any of the Indian languages. It's a phonetic abhugida, which basically means, I mean, most of the Indian languages are abhugida. So there's the consonant and you associate the consonant with a vowel and you create a letter. So there's like for the, for in, you know, pretty much all the Indian languages, the ka, there's ka, there's ki, there's ke, there's ku. So it's like that. So it's, Thai has that as well. The writing of Thai contains a lot of loops and holes, kind of like Tamil, for instance. It's different, you'll see it's different. Has it, who's been to Thailand here? I'm sure some of us have been to Thailand. Yeah, a few people have been to Thailand. So you'll notice that the writing system looks very, very Indian. And for the untrained eye, it looks, I mean, this might as well be another Indian script. And there's lots of marks. So unlike Chinese, which doesn't give you any marks for tones, Thai does. So there's tons of different marks that you can use for different sounds and different intonations and reflections that you can make, which is each letter. So this example is a Thai serif. So as you can see, it looks super similar to English, right? Like, I mean, there's, this looks like an S right here. That's a backwards G. I mean, it's, they've really, it looks like they've just taken English and screwed it up a little bit and made it their own, which is effectively what they've done, except they've really utilized what's already worked in English or with Western script and applied it to the, to the complexity, I guess, to the complexities that Thai might have. Is it also the case with Russian? Yeah, yeah, Russian is similar. Yeah. It's going up in English. Well, the script, the Russian script is kind of developed off of the European route anyway. So, but this didn't, which is what's interesting about this, this developed off of an Indian, Indic, not Indian per se, but Indic route. So, for example, the S thing you see here is a R, it's an R. Let's see, there's some other ones. This is just an R right here. And it's, and the way that they've, the way that they have kind of manipulated the alphabet to match up with a Western ideal for a Seraf is interesting. I guess in Western context, this would be considered a modern Seraf because there's a lot of contrast between how thin the Serafs are and how thick the trunks of the letters are. Also, this one was commissioned, you'll find this a lot in typography that fonts are commissioned or typefaces are commissioned based on need for a specific type of project. So this one was for, if my research was correct, it was for the L'Officiel magazine for the Thai version. And the typeface is L'Officiel TH. This is, this typeface is called Krum 3 Simple. And again, it takes cues from Western sans-serafs. So I mean, you see the same type of thing about the bra, which is, it just becomes an S. The, this is a la, but it looks like an a, like a lowercase a almost in English. So you see, so you see the, the way that they have kind of manipulated the language to fit a, to fit a, to fit a concept that has already worked in Western type. Which, which is, I think what makes Thai so interesting because you just, that they've been able to do this with such success and that it actually sometimes, if you look from afar, might look like English in a way, but you know that something's off. This one is called Ikea script, Thai. And if anyone's been to Ikea, you'll see like the sale signs and everything will be written in this type of a, of course, Western writing. But this one in was done for Thai. So this was another example of the flexibility of Thai alphabet. This is just another example of that as well. You can see how easily the letters in Thai match up with the way the letters in English interact with one another. This, this, this project I thought was super interesting and you might know about this because this was in, this was, this project was for the development of the lumen type phase. Okay, yeah. That's what I figured because I knew you went to writing. So, so Ben Mitchell is the guy that created this and basically it was a, it was a type phase to integrate Burmese, which you see on the left, Thai and Latin and no Western writing system as well. The whole idea was to, to have a, and you might know more about this than I do, but to integrate I guess the personalities of each, each type phase or each language into one so that each, whether it's in any in English, whether it's a ya in Thai or a similar character or if similar letter in Burmese it brings off the same kind of, it conveys the same meaning, if you will. They usually initialize it. Yeah, sometimes. I mean you see that here too because the Thai has its own numbering system and a lot of times they use that too. Like say similarly here in India, we have our own numbering systems as well, but you'll often see the Western numbers or the Arabic numbers, I don't know the exact term for it, but in the Arabic numbering system which is ironic I guess. So this one is a, this is just a road sign in Bangkok and this is just an example to show how they've, in Thailand the road signs have been standardized, so they've used, they've used, this is the, I mean you have, I'm sure if you've been to Australia or the U.S. or Canada, this is a type phase that you see on all the road signs. So they've integrated that with a corresponding Thai type phase and this is an example of how that sort of thing can be standardized and applied across the country. So this is another example of melding to languages types together. So this one is Helvetica, you saw earlier there is a Helvetica for Arabic that was developed. There's also a Thai Helvetica and I'm willing to wager that they were able to do a Thai Helvetica because of how translatable and how flexible the Thai alphabet can be with the shapes and the way that Helvetica already operates in a western context. Like this looks like a backwards C but it's a wa in Thai. The next we'll move into perhaps the most interesting, interesting part of the presentation that's Indian type. And the interesting thing about India is that I believe out of there's about 24, there's about 25, the 85% of what I was talking about, 85% of the typefaces in the world that are non-western, or the 85% of the population, sorry. A large majority, a large percentage of those are actually Indians because the Indian writing system. So you'll see, I mean there's Arabic and then there's all the Indian writing systems and then there's Thai, Burmese, Lao, Khmer, Chinese, Korean and Japanese and that's about it for major in-use today writing systems. The rest of them are Indians so who can name all of these? I think I heard all the names there. No one's in a room, that's what we're all about to bring up. Okay, she's in a room, okay. Yeah, so there's nine major in-use today, official Indian scripts that you see that are official. So there's obviously Dev Nagari, which you use for Hindi and Marathi and everything, company uses it as well, which by far is the lion's share of Indian type, or Indian scripts in the country. Below that is Kanada, I just took that right off in the very close to my house. I thought it was a cute saying, which just says, who can read Kanada here? Just a few, okay. Plastidae Ussidu, which you wrote down. Green is like, green is like, green is like, Plastidae Ussidu means green is, green alone is breath or breathing or something like that. Below that is Tamil, which I just took that picture which I did last week, and there's Bengali, which I have not been able to master yet. Super complicated. Above that, this is Gujarati, and this is Malayalam, Guru Ki, which is essentially Punjabi, Telugu, and Oriya. And Oriya is one of them, which people tend to overlook quite a bit just because of the, I guess, small population, I think there's only about 33 million native Oriyas speakers compared to far more, far higher numbers of each of these. Or far higher influence in the country. So clearly, we're looking at a very diverse, we are the most diverse country, obviously, in a variety of ways, but also in type, and the number of scripts that we have. Interestingly enough, all of these writing systems come from the Brahmish, which was used in Emperor Shokha's time. So Devanagri, and you'll see obviously parallels between Devanagri, and Bengali, and Guru Mukhi, as well as Gujarati. Gujarati almost looks like Devanagri, but don't have to line on top. And then, kind of not Telugu, but very similar. And Malayalam and Tamil kind of look similar as well. Oriya is the only one that really stands out as being really different. But even that is, if you kind of dig deep, you'll see similarities with the other languages. So the state of typography in India today is one which makes me very happy and also kind of sad. I think there is a lack of options. Just given the size of India, and given the scope of things that are happening in the country, there is a lack of official options. I'm official, meaning typefaces that have been developed and created by typographers. It's informal a lot of times, and that's very obvious. When you go outside, you can see guys painting on the side of the road. I guess we consider it informal typography. And a lot of times informal typography is kind of the essence of India because these guys have no real training. There's, and some might, but they really are just, they're just being creative with what they know and what they need to type out for this particular, or what they need to paint out for a particular task. It's impractical, and I think in a lot of times it's the informal type that's the impractical type because it's very flashy and very colorful and very exciting and very cool looking, but it's not really practical for day to day use most of the time in terms of informal type. And the other thing that I think is a reason for why there may be a lack of options is because English is already everywhere. And a lot of people can already read English. So what is the incentive, or where is the need for developing types for typefaces or fonts for each of the nine major Indian scripts? So these are just a couple of quick examples. This one is in Chennai. The top is Tamil, obviously the middle is English, and the bottom is Hindu. And you'll see the creativity. You'll see this particular type of designs on the type a lot of places where these bevel outwards, and it's just a pain to think that these guys use. And that's a cool example of how these guys are just being creative and being cool with the way that they do type. You don't see the same type of excitement with the Tamil or the Urdu, on this one. In fact, I have seen, like, Karnataka, they have done this bevel, and I have done a project that I told you about, I did a lot of photography in Karnataka just trying to find out. So these guys have done a lot of effects, like having two or three layers of, like, of all the type. Yeah, totally, yeah, that's there. I'm just saying in this particular example, it's not there. This is a, I didn't get to read this whole thing, but it'll probably take me a while to read it. But this is, I saw this in a shelter in Sakalishpur, which is, I went there a couple of months ago, and it has something to do with hygiene and bathrooms or family planning or something like that. So if people can, if people can read, if people can wanna read the whole thing through, then they can probably explain that to everybody. But basically the point is that it's hand-painted, it's an official, it's an official kind of notice board type of thing, but it's totally hand-painted, so effectively making it informal in this case. The informality extends to very official places as well. Again, so this is Chennai Central Station, this is the official station side, and it's hand-painted. So that speaks to the informality there as well. Generally, this is like the still-fake stencils. Yeah, well, sometimes, yeah. How do you differentiate between the official and the... How do you know it's hand-painted? Between, it's like a developed, between like, whether it's like a developed type force that has been built by, officially, through, you know, by a typographer versus something that is just put together. And you'll see that, you'll see the others. The next sign over will not have the same type of look to the letters, because it's just been painted. And you've got different ones in each station. Sorry? You've got different stations and you've got different ones in each station. Different ones in each station. Different stations. Yeah, different ones within each station, and of course, in different stations as well. And yeah, what you said was right, it's not standardized. Well, I guess standardization is the key thing, but I was gonna bring that up later, but this is another one in Chennai. This is the bus, the Metropolitan Bus Authority, which has also been hand-painted. But this, if you see on any Chennai bus, we'll use the exact same type of stencil. So, you know, this perhaps you could consider as standardized, and depending on, for this particular context at least. Can anyone read the other one? Yeah. Today. Yeah. No. No. So, Ratna Ramathan is a designer who's, I believe, splits her time between the UK and here. And she made an interesting point, which is that there's a great need in India for basic functional typographic design. And that was, and that comes back to the earlier point that I made that things tend to be flashy, not standardized, very colorful and exciting, but not quite functional and not quite applicable practically. For things, and when I mean practical, practically applicable, I mean things like textbooks or road signs or just very simple things that will make it easy for people to live their lives. But I think with many of the changes that are happening in India and with an increase, I guess, in delivering importance for typographic design, you'll see that there'll be changes in a lot of different ways. These are just four ways. I think as technology changes in the country, for example, there's an entire, I mean the entire, there's a whole generation in India which has skipped the whole landline phone phase and went straight to mobile phones. So, what are they reading on the mobile phones? A lot of these people are not able to read English or they're not able to read Latin script. So, in those types of circumstances, there'll be real value in delivering typography for a local language or, for example, that's readable on a mobile phone. Literacy can be improved by standardizing simple typography, I think. And that's something that we can touch on or that can go on for hours, that's another discussion. But again, to the point with the mobile phones that I made earlier, localization can happen with typography, which means that typography, as it makes sense for each place, can be developed. For example, how Thai brought in Western styles of type and adapted it directly to their local context. So, maybe new fonts will be developed based on the local cultural needs. So, if there's an IKEA that opens up with us, what if there's a need for a, you know, they have an Audrey style IKEA script. It's probably not the case because IKEA's clientele will probably not read English. And standardization, which, as they mentioned, was super, super important. And I think standardization is one of the things that drives practical applicability for typography. So, as you see development happening in India, you'll see, for example, there's BDA boards, for instance, which most of them use the same type. Banggood development authority. And you'll see the similar thing in Mumbai and Delhi as well, and Delhi road signs all have the same type in English, Punjabi, Devnagar, and Urdu. So, that sort of standardization, as it reaches beyond the metros and into the villages and into different areas of the country, will create an avenue for typography to flourish for Indian type. I found this interesting, this is in Singapore. And Singapore has standardized a tumult type face. The Bengali is just there because of that specific locale, which is in little India, and there's a lot of bum on the issue of people there in that area. But basically, it's interesting that Singapore has standardized the Indian type face, and we have yet to see such a level of standardization in most places within India. Like I said, Delhi and other places have it, but most of it is don't. Like I said earlier, practical applicability for, oops, practical applicability for type is key for the reasons I mentioned earlier. And one foundry, I guess, that creates type types, which I think that I admire a lot, and is one of the major ones here in the country, is Ahmedabad, and it's the Indian type foundry, which has created a set of a variety of different type faces for different languages, and they've touched on, let's see, they've not heard of Gujarati, Guru Muki, Bengali, and Tamil, as well as Latin script as well. So this looks super simple, not that exciting, but this is a type of type that we'll see, I think we need more of in the country too, as India develops and as India becomes a world power. The other interesting thing about this is that the first, I believe it's currently not here at the top, but it was at the Mahakumar Island this year, Life Boy did a, I don't know, did you see that? Yeah. It wasn't a project, it was Co-Hindered. Okay, maybe it was Co-Hindered, but basically it was an Indian type foundry, typeface, that was used by Life Boy to stamp chapatis that they were serving at the Mahakumar Island saying that you should wash your hands before eating. So that's just a creative way to use a very easy to read, practically applicable typeface for that particular campaign. So basically think of all the other cool stuff that you can do to reach the masters with basic, very easy to read typography that's practical and readable. So here's the world map again with all the countries and scripts together. So just to touch on again, so with one third of the world's land mass, it's 50% of the world's typography is non-western or 50% of the world's, or 80, I forgot the numbers, but basically what third of the world's land mass holds the vast majority of typefaces, 85% of the typefaces in the world. So as these countries develop, especially ours here in India, the development of new typefaces is crucial I think and is something that we can all look forward to. And it's something that's gonna be a signifier I think for the development of India going forward. So basically that's basically about it for what I have to say today. What's the other color of the top of North America? Last question. That's, that's, sorry? No, no, it's none of it. No, no, that was, that's the none of it region of Canada where it's, they use, they don't use western typeface, but it's a very, it's a very small, minor languages only, it's by a few thousand people, so hence, I didn't include small languages in this presentation, or small, you know, types, typefaces are type or scripts that are used by a small, very small number of people. So yeah, any questions? Thank you.