Alongside our design practice, we are committed to research. Several of us hold doctoral degrees and actively conduct independent academic-level research to better understand the perception of letters, reading, and the world’s languages. We are also committed to sharing our insights and experience with others. We regularly give lectures and lead workshops, and we have organized three professional conferences. We also openly share our work through publications and online tools.

Design regression

Design Regression is a journalette (mini journal) publishing texts that are about design for reading and reading-related research. It aims for the hard-to-get blend of approachability with seriousness and relevance to practice.

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Hyperglot

Hyperglot helps type designers answer a seemingly simple question of language support in fonts: When can I use font A to set texts in language B? It takes a pragmatic answer by identifying a standard character set for each orthography used by a language.

Hyperglot is a webapp and an open-sourced project available as a command-line tool, Python package, and database.

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Universal specimen

Typesetting multilingual documents requires a lot of planning. Does the font we want to use support the languages we need? If it does, does it represent all the languages equally well? Which translations will it cause to run long, and which will it cut short? Does the situation change if we decide to use another font, or another size? Will this column width suffice for a language with long words, like Finnish? And what about that line height? Does it account for the frequent diacritics used in languages like Czech or Hungarian?

With the Universal Specimen, we wanted to make some of these questions easier to answer. The specimen/app allows you to easily typeset translations of the same text side by side. It lets you directly preview the effect of common typographic parameters on the appearance and economy (text length) of a specific language.

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Legibility: how and why typography affects ease of reading

Helped with funding from Google we have published Mary Dyson’s book on Legibility in English and Spanish. The book is available online for free. Mary Dyson spent most of her academic life at the renowned Department of Typography & Graphic Communication at the University of Reading (UK) and dedicated her career to research into reading and typography, writing numerous papers on the subject. Her book is a comprehensive attempt to make descriptions of research more accessible to those who can benefit: practitioners, students, enthusiasts.

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Timeline

Mar 2024 Articles Printed specimens are available again, some of them for free
Mar 2024 Articles The new Aisha comes with exuberant variable swashes
Jan 2024 Type releases Adapter Georgian by Ana Sanikidze
Jan 2024 Lectures “Elements of multi-script typography: the wayfinding edition” at the University of Reading, UK
Jan 2024 Academic Can we selectively attend to the top halves of letters and ignore the bottom halves?
Nov 2023 Type releases Handjet Korean by Ha-neul Park and Lee-su Yoo
Nov 2023 Our projects Hyperglot v2
Oct 2023 Type releases Clone PE by Lasko Džurovski
Oct 2023 Type releases Updated Clone Rounded PE by Lasko Džurovski
Sep 2023 Type releases Adapter Tamil by Aadarsh Rajan
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