October 10, 2008

| Candidate Analogies >>

To my ever-increasing embarrassment, I am totally monolingual. Maybe that’s why I am also increasingly fascinated with the typography of other languages: What’s the Helvetica of Japanese? What’s the Comic Sans of Hindi? Who’s the hot young Arabic type designer?

This doesn’t quite answer those questions, but it’s pretty awesome: Jonathan Hoefler on the insanely logical and self-consistent Korean alphabet:

Typographically, I envy my Korean counterparts who get to work with Hangul, with its letterforms that always fit into a square, and can be read in any direction (horizontally or vertically.) And best of all: no kerning!

Any pointers to cool non-Roman-alphabet typography out there?