.detalsnart siht evah esaelP .noitamrofni tnatropmI
This is a typical print from the city’s notice of rezoning/development and looking for residents’ input on the subjective lot.
This multilingual section in this version updated in 2021 seems relatively fine. Though far from perfect, at least it doesn’t contain any major mistakes. The minor inconsistency across languages are some questionable typeface choices for non-roman scripts, and weird kerning/spacing. You may argue that this is somewhat acceptable.
But a unargubaly tokenism work is this following piece of work:
So what if it is English that been discriminated and being treated as a token to show the they care about multi-lingualism?
I call these posters “my tiny rebellious acts”. I wanted to apply some of the hideousness of tokenism that has been consistently out there (see attached photo of voting right billboard from last year’s midterm election) to English. It is like “what if English is less important and we just trough on some random glyphs on there to make it looks like we care about English users”. So the Farci part is correct, which means “important information”. The English part contains some mistreatment of R-L scripts I have encountered, or I assume how would someone with no knowledge of typesetting in an L-R script would do. The key message for audiences is on the last poster, which reads “wish you now know how they feel”, set in right to left, and flipped some letters to show some “extra care” from the designer/institute who made these posters.
While I was developing these posters, I thought about how to would a digitalized typeface better support the (not so common) situation of a right to left writing, especially if it can direct the reading direction by assisting the flow of words/phrases/lines.
For the typeface, it’s more like a quick test on how to digitally incorporate some of the features of R-L script//hand writing that make the writing of paragraph flow. I applied some techniques of Farsi/Arabic handwriting, particularly clockwise writing and complex script conjugations, to find how some features can be digitalized and optimized for an R-L setting. I did have a bit of the left-handed writing habit in mind and found some similar points with the sinistral hand typeface. The differences might be from our different viewpoints as I was referencing Farsi/Arabic writing (which prioritizes the flow of a line) and Phaedra was referencing Hebrew (which prioritizes individual letters).
I was not thinking about the intended use since there probably has no use case for R-L typesettings for Latin alphabet so I was just focusing on some details and a limited amount of letters. (I also set the kerning exclusively for these two words, so not really something I can directly apply to a work in the future)
Now we do is lets hope more people can realize tokenism is just as bad as any other kind of -ism.