An article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer discusses the unique dialect of the Pacific Northwest.  Most linguists think of the entire western part of the country as only having one dialect, however, many local linguists feel that there is a distinct dialect in this specific region of the country.  Jennifer Ingle, a student studying language at the University of Washington, began to closely document the specific features of her local dialect.  She focused specifically on vowel sounds.  

“Among the findings: Many locals, especially women, speak in what experts call “creaky voice”; we’ve done away with a particular vowel used by Easterners; we really like to emphasize the “s” in words; we’re not Californian and we’re not Canadian.”

“Say “caught” and “cot” out loud. If you’re a true Northwest speaker, the words will sound identical. Linguists call this the “low-back merger” because we’ve merged these two vowel sounds. On much of the East Coast, these same words will sound different. “Creaking is a way of making those distinctions that are being lost,” Wassink said. Just as Bostonians tend to compensate in their speech for removing the “r” from many words, she said, we might speak creaky to compensate for refusing to use both vowels.”

“Another piece of evidence has to do with how Californians do something known as “fronting the vowel,” Ingle said. This is considered standard to Western dialect and occurs when a speaker pronounces “rude” as “ri-ood” or “move” as “mi-oove”.”

The design above, named Rivermap, was created by Kerr | Noble, a graphic design firm.  They set out to represent the emotions invoked by the River Thames in London, England.  They decided the best words to convey their message was a poem by John Banck,  A Description of London, 1738, which they then put into the geographical form of the river.  They chose the font Caslon for its historic value and ability to convey joy, and was conveniently designed the same time as when Banck wrote the poem.   

Writing Without Words is a project created by Stefanie Posavec, a communication designer, striving to give visual form to literary words.  It “explores methods of visually representing text and visualizes the difference in writing styles of various authors”.  Above is an image from the project created by documenting everything from paragraph size to sentence length in the first chapter of On the Road.  She color coded the lines to represent key themes in the novel.

Above is a First Chapter diagram in which each line represents a sentence and its length is determined by how many words are in the sentence.  Every new sentence means a turn to the right.  ”The more tightly wound the drawing means a shorter, choppier flow of sentences was used, while a larger drawing represents a writing style that utilises long, flowing sentences”.  

Above is another diagram of sentences called “Rhythm Textures”.   ”Each word is represented by a line, and the thickness of the lines (and the space between the lines) radiating outwards from the center point provides a record of the pauses and empasis created by the punctuation”.

The picture above is a screen capture of the digital typeface created by Jonathan Puckey, a graphic designer based in the Netherlands.  ”A prototype exploring textured typography. The tool picks between 140 generated font weights depending on your typing speed”.  This could easily be translated into the design of a typeface that reacts to the rhythm of speech.  I recently read an article about how authors can write authentic dialogue for characters with different dialects by playing with the rhythm of words.  Authors tend to try to write out their speech phonetically to get the idea across, like the almost incomprehensible dialogue Mark Twain created for Huck Finn.

The video above was created by Hudson-Powell, a design office located in England.  They set out to design a typeface that would emphasize the freedom that digital environments can give to designers when it comes to typography.  Understanding that many digital typefaces today are still created using print based techniques and thinking, they developed a type that adapts type to respond to the they exist within.  The example above only deals with scale change that is possible and shows how a typeface can get more detailed when big and less when small.  By exposing print typography “memes” that we continue to follow today, we can free ourselves from our assumptions and push the world of digital type further.

“Type can be language specific” allowing for us to “recognize certain decisions”.  ”If type can be language specific… type can tell for which language it was designed, recognize certain decisions, which designers took because they were really thinking that this font will work in German. Which means that, for example, capitals would be lighter because they are used really in the middle of sentences rather, for example, capitals traditionally are really heavy because they indicate the beginning of a sentence”.  We are ultimately conditioned by our language. 

In one of the books I’m reading, it goes into detail about each letter and its evolution.  It appears the major change that occurred to our letterform was when the reading of texts went from right to left to reading from left to right in the beginning of the fourth century BCE.  Because of this cultural decision, we think of type as being oriented on a plane, similar to how we view compass directions on a map.  But now with digital technology, we can read type in all directions and all dimensions.  Will this effect the type of the future, especially since we are increasingly reading texts on the computer?  Is reading left to right the best method on a computer and should we take a cue from hyperlinking and create letterform that transitions and morphs, emphasizing the connections of letters?

This typeface, a combination of phonetics and Katakana, was created by graphic designer Michael Johnson of Johnson Banks. Katakana is the simplest of characters in the Japanese language and, thus, was the best choice to conduct an experiment on readability.  Since he visits Japan quite often, Johnson wanted to see if he could create a typeface that would allow him to communicate better in Japanese.  This hybrid he calls Phonetikana and is an interesting idea when thinking about how to better convey English language.

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The spectrograph image above is from the book Type and Typography by Phil Baines and Andrew Haslam.  It documents over a period of time the variation of speed, volume, and intensity of a person’s speech.  It is essentially a scientific visualization of language, including everything from the sounds to the gaps.  ”In speech we do not create words as single units in the way that we do typographically” (Baines).  

Below are pictures from a graphic design student’s project that is shown in the book.  The student used the phonemes found in spectrograph image to translate into typography.  He redrew the letterforms 3-dimensionally by plotting the wavelengths.  

In the video, type was created through moving a video camera in front of an exit sign.  It shows how the fluidity of language can be created without using digital programs.  I wonder what would happen if you combined light with sound in order to track the rhythm of our language.  Would you be able to pick up on the fluidity and sometimes choppiness of our language and would it be readable?  

Sign language is multi-dimensional, time-sensitive, interactive, and highly visual.  In this type experiment, the designer represented the 3-dimensional hand shapes formed in sign language through 2-dimensional shapes.  This study made me begin to think about how we can take the study of sign language to inform the way we create type for a spoken language.  The interpretation of sound into 3-dimensional form has been studied before.  Can language be displayed in 2-dimensional type by first studying the 3-dimensionality of its sound?

This example shows the hand shapes of sign language reinterpreted through matchsticks.