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.

Go to Design regression

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.

Go to Hyperglot

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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Timeline

Nov 2022 Lectures Type at the centre of branding at Brno Bold, Brno, Czechia
Jul 2022 Interviews An interview for TypeParis
Jul 2022 Lectures “Questioning the obvious: different ways of seeing” at ICTVC 8, Thessaloniki, Greece
Jul 2022 Lectures “Hyperglot – a database and tools for discovering language support in fonts” at ICTVC 8, Thessaloniki, Greece
Jun 2022 Lectures Guest visit and public lecture at Type Paris, France
Jun 2022 Lectures Guest lecture at ANRT, Nancy, France
2022 Academic The sequel to exploring disfluency: Do we remember the visual appearance of words?
2022 Academic Elements of multi-script typography: paragraphs and pixels
2022 Academic Elements of multi-script typography: codes, keys, and word shapes
May 2021 Interviews “How important is harmony when designing multiscript type systems?” in Type 01 magazine
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