 And I'm Jess McCarty, and we are the folks behind the Instagram account titles in translation. Since March, we've been creating visual translations of film title art from around the world, including the United States, Japan, Egypt, Iran, Greece, and India. Just to give you a sense of how this sort of works, here is a film title for the Malayalam film, Rasam, or Soup. In this case, we give ourselves a day, maybe two, to really just get into it and try to create a new version of this in our respective scripts. So I created the Korean-Hungul version. And here's my version in Devnagri, which is a North Indian script. And because I'm a modern calligraphy script designer, I selected Latin. We've also invited other designers living and working across the globe to participate. And so far, we have translations in 14 different writing systems, and we're excited to share some of them with you today. All of us wanted to try our hand at localizing a film title in another script. So as we began the project, we started to look around the industry, like, what are other people doing? And when we did this, we found sort of four main approaches. Number one is just captioning. In this case, the original logo is actually preserved when the film moves around the world, and they simply added caption. Sometimes they match the original design. Most times they don't. And in these cases, it's nice because the original design is preserved of the logo, but the problem is that it leaves the core branding of the film completely illegible in some situations. So the second option is custom lettering. In this case, the designer works to keep the style and the composition of the original logo while they're translating or transliterating the words into a new script, creating custom artwork. Another option is typesetting the translation. And so in this case, a designer tries to create a new matching version using already existing typefaces. And hopefully it will match the original. This is the Thai and Japanese versions. And finally, there's the complete rebrand. In this case, there is a purposeful decision to move away from the original design language of the film. In this case, the Korean film on the left was translated to French and US markets. As we elect the constraints of a film studio, we found ourselves most often drawn to the second approach, custom translation. And there were certain design attributes that made the translation process fairly straightforward. When a film title was drawn with thick strokes and bold shapes, like in the film Godzilla, the Japanese title, Gojira, we found the blocky style was really easy to adapt to our script's underlying structures by adding lots of corners, angles, and using a very heavy low contrast stroke. It really helped to make the designs feel unified. Titles that were rendered using a common everyday tool, like the Telugu film Fida, also felt natural for us to replicate across our three scripts. All of us were able to create something that felt really fast, natural, and definitely related. But by far the easiest way to make the scripts feel unified was to use a common background shape who wouldn't recognize the multi-script versions of the iconic Batman logo. I mean, I think we did a pretty good job with the lettering but it's really that outside shape that makes it a quick read, I would say. Our project was not without challenges though. As we talked about before, standard tools were easy but non-standard tools became very challenging. In the case of Gazel, it's a Persian film, they used a pointed noodle brush that had a very high contrast ratio and sort of almost spent Syrian overlaps of the curves. So this was really easy for Jess who did this lovely spent Syrian version on the bottom right but for Erin and I, it proved a lot more challenging. We had to go back to pen and paper and really try to understand how the tool would work in our individual scripts. We also had to consider how to connect our letter forms. So for Jess and I, there were often film titles that felt dark, fussy, and crowded. And so for this Greek film, Othrakos, instead of leaving our letters connected, we thought that if we disconnected them, we were better able to replicate the original feeling of the original design. Now this is not a very common style in Devanagri and some of the letters could be confused for one another in certain situations so it has to be used with care. Some of the film titles contained a unique graphic element in the place of a letter. In the film Diaryamina, the Persian hood, the shape in red on the right, was cleverly replaced with a solid circle which resulted in a nice visual pun. But what's a script designer to do when no nice round letter forms exist in their script? I tried replacing various letters with the shape before finally just tucking an identical circle as intentionally as I could in the central axis of the composition. I wrapped the surrounding letter forms and tapered some of them as well so that the shape was well integrated and it works, but I don't think the pun quite translates. In Tonare no Totoro, the Japanese film here on the top left, there's a small little white creature with the rabbit ears who takes the place of a stroke in the character Arie. Obviously we wanted to preserve that guy and find him a home in each of our little designs so that was an interesting challenge of where we could put him and keep the legibility of those letter forms. Additionally, you might notice on the last part of the Totoro title, there's like the pointedness to the top of those forms that replicates sort of his ears. So for Jess and Erin, they actually chose, similar to before, this was a disconnected version of their scripts so that they could preserve that original feel. An additional issue was when the two scripts that we were using varied in terms of height, in terms of width or intensity. So when we did Deadpool, my initial idea was the one here on the top where I wanted to keep alignment between the baseline and the cap height of the Latin. However, because of the chunkiness and the thickness of the strokes that I wanted to use, that last syllable started to have some really, really thin elements which I don't know, it kind of just took away from the original style and eventually I decided to just allow those characters to descend a little bit, even though it broke the rules that I wanted to follow to give them a bit more voice. Something none of us had anticipated was how hard it was to translate a relatively neutral, simple style. So for Hotaru no Haka, because there wasn't a really overt texture or style applied to the letters, I wasn't quite sure how to approach it. And because I'm not really familiar with Japanese, I ended up having to compare the lettering with already existing Japanese typefaces to try to see what those subtle differences were that made it unique. So there were a few kind of angled lines and cuts and open apertures that I was able to observe. Now why is this important? Because in my first attempt, I made what's on the left there which is kind of a caricature of Japanese. It might almost be like wonton type. It's mildly offensive maybe. So I stepped backward and did those observations and it created the more subtle version on the right. Now I think it's probably a better localized version of it but is it recognizable as the same title? Probably not. I found that without an exaggerated style to copy, it's really hard to make subtle typography look similar across scripts. Speaking of subtle typography, the Fantasia logo actually became a really challenging project for us as well. We thought it'd be simple, high contrast, tall letters, thin, elegant, beautiful, right? Well, I actually went through a whole bunch of designer visions. One here on the top right was my first attempt and I wanted to preserve the syllables of the Korean and it just wasn't working. There was something about it that didn't replicate the original feel of that first logo. So I then moved to the bottom left where I started to split the syllables apart to try and get that repetition and the strokes, not the strokes, but the, yeah, the repetition. The spacing. The spacing, thank you. Again, not quite there. And so finally, in the bottom right version, I just pulled everything apart, made it all evenly spaced and I think it really starts to capture that original design. I felt like I was defining a unicorn and extremely condensed, yet widely spaced, connected, lowercase, hairline calligraphy script from the 1930s. It was a mouthful and it was a challenge. Connecting each letter proved problematic. I tried to space the letters evenly but when I did so, it was impossible to harmonize the angles of the up strokes. In order to overcome the challenge, I disconnected certain letters like the T and the I and I altered the forms of others, like the lowercase S. I also experimented with scale and proportion, especially when it came to the uppercase F. To say there were many iterations for each of us is putting it mildly. We'd encourage any workhorse designer who wants to stretch into this kind of global script translation to maybe put this style off for just a little bit. And what can we say? We are masochists. We decided to take on Spartacus specifically because it has serifs. Now that feature isn't common to any of our scripts. How hard could it be? It's just a tiny little blurb but it was very hard for all three of us. After attempting to reinvent the wheel yet again, this time with a connected, extended, a tallot, Clarendon camera, I cried uncle and I stopped trying to shoehorn the translation. I completely rebranded the logo instead. For me, Korean is usually, when a Korean typeface is paired with a Latin one, especially in a serif design, it's usually done with the brush style. And so in my initial take, I wanted to go and do that as a brush style lettering. However, my first one there on the top is too pointy, not enough contrast, way too dark. So I rounded it out, tried to increase the contrast but it still kind of felt a little blotchy to me and it didn't really have the smoothness of the original logo. So finally, I really tried to simplify and clarify that original design into my bottom version here. I, on the other hand, committed a very serious high brow type crime and I added some serifs to my stems. Now, this is known as Latinization and it's something that I was taught never to do. It's very, you know, possibly offensive, kind of inappropriate. It's problematic. It's very controversial. But recently, I've had a change of heart. So for centuries, calligraphers have added these elongated kind of decorative serifs to North Indian scripts. And also in the past 50 or 60 years, serif letter forms have become really common in South Indian typography. Even some of the top lettering artists and Devanagari designers today are using serifs. And so I figure if native speakers and native users have embraced it, I feel it's appropriate for me to do this. It's part of the script culture now. So that's why I decided to go forward with it. Here you can see all of our final versions. While we're pretty happy with the work we put into it, we still feel like there's probably a bit more to do. This one really proved to be our white whale. However, our embracing of taboos didn't end there and continued with this script for El Mustahil. The left leaning slant of the original design actually proved quite easy for me because Korean handwriting has a natural left leaning slant to it. However, for Justin Aaron, it proved a bit more challenging. Yeah, we could have chosen a right slanting style of handwriting as a standard cultural equivalent, but instead we slanted ours to the left and we used the elongated shapes in the original to try and bring a bit of harmony and make a subtle reference to the Egyptian origin of the film. As you can tell from the previous examples, one of our constant struggles was wondering if we'd ever pushed ourselves too far to achieve stylistic alignment. We were a bit afraid that our work might kick up an online hornet's nest. So we reached out to the experts, native speaking designers who instinctively know what's eligible, insensitive, or totally tactfully cool. We asked if they would give us their take on translation and if they'd be interested in sharing some of their own work with our audience. Let's take a look at some up close. So Adarsh Rajan was inspired by the Godfather logo to create this striking Tamil version. You'll know he added small serifs and extended the, sorry. Oh yeah, God character. Oh yes, yes, sorry. The God character in the bottom left of his version to follow the shape of the G. Additionally, Shadiq Aziz created this awesome version of the Jackie Brown logo. We asked him to share his thoughts on this process and what messages he might have for other people and he said, I'd act in a feature from one script to another. Won't do any harm to the scripts. It's all about harmony. Aditya Bayu, an Indonesian designer, created this Javanese version of Mr. Robot. Now Javanese is rarely used today. The Latin alphabet is used instead. But Aditya is spending his spare time creating type projects to try to revive it. He feels it's important to try to make the script feel modern and relevant to help with its revival. Aryan Gunarta, who is another Indonesian designer, made this black letter Javanese rendition of Lady Bird and hopefully his experiments will encourage young people to embrace the script. And Metropolis, the 1927 film by Fritz Lang, was reinterpreted in the North Indian script Gujarati by Zidane Bostawala. Note how she repurposed the triangular tittle into the vowel strokes of her version. It was then translated into Chinese by Calvin Kwok who added rough edges, angular details, and negative spaces within the denser characters. And we've also got a Japanese version by Toshio Magari. He retained the original O shapes from the Latin. We asked Toshi for his thoughts on multi-script design. Does he feel that the mixing of attributes and the appropriation of styles is okay? Here's what Toshi had to say. Languages change over time. Is there a reason why only the past generations are allowed to be creative? Woo! Up next, we have Solbash's classic vertigo logo done as a grimoire script by Tsuchita Grover. And then additionally, a Greek version by Emilios Atheofanos. It's longer. I don't know if we're gonna say it. I don't know if we're gonna say it. I assume you all remember the classic Star Wars logo here done in Devanagru by Vedak Sharma, and also here one by Kurush Bekor. Translated into Persian, very cool. Yeah. The 1960s-inspired Austin Powers logo was translated into Bay Bayan script by Lloyd Zapanta. Now, Bay Bayan is an indigenous script of the Philippines that is very rare and endangered. You don't see it. So he's trying to help revive it by creating modern interpretations of it like this. Lippi Raval created this really groovy Gujarati version. Now, Gujarati is a North Indian script that usually has curved edges on the bottom stroke. So what she did with the curls makes a lot of sense. Very cool. And Amelie Bonet, she's a French designer who studies Indic scripts. She created this Devanagru version with a really cool swoosh at the top there for the vowel stroke. And finally, again, Kurush wowed us with this Arabic script version, which looks like it belongs inside of a lava lamp. So these are just a few of the amazing designs that were created for the project. They are all fantastic examples of whimsy, technique, and inspiration mixed together into a global melting pot of type, language, and art. It is proof of what can happen when designers push through convention and let their imaginations wander into the typographic cinematic universe. We hope you'll join us on this journey together. Please come follow our project on Instagram. Just a minute. We'll be sharing more guest submissions. We'll be featuring more of our own work, but most importantly, we would love to contribute, to ask you guys in this room to contribute to the project as well. Let's have some fun on the internet.