I know little of New Zealand, and its multiple cultures.

I know that Arabic and Urdu are very similar technically except for a handful of characters unique to Urdu.

For this many non-Arab designers, and Arabic-specific designers too, created a very unsuccessful group of Urdu fonts. Although they were technically correct, many Persian customers complained. “When will true Urdu fonts become available reflecting Persian culture?”

I was surprized. I was told repeatedly that there is a sttylistic difference between Arabic and Urdu, reflecting not only in art, music, architecture, food, clothes, even in accent in speaking, choice of words, and of course language.

I saw that Urdu and other languages needed a lot of cultural reseach to produce successful type designs.

Various European modernists were convinced that certain sans-serif styles represented the culture of industrialized twentieth-century nations. The Nazis tried to establish blackletter designs as the national face of Germany (but weren’t especially consistent about it. Neither group ever really settled on any particular face, although the Swiss modernists did narrow things down to Akzidenz/Univers/Helvetica. And I don’t think that either one was especially successful at trying to reflect their culture with those styles.

Consider your own situation: how does one typeface reconcile traditionalist Maori, white New Zealanders, and the Maori that live in-between the two?

You should probably read Tschichold’s writing about sans type in The New Typography and his later attacks on modernist monoculture (some appear in the appendices of Ruari McLean’s books about Tschichold.).

Here’s the Metro Letters project, which asked whether a typeface could reflect the Twin Cities (Minneapolis & St. Paul, Minnesota, USA), which might be useful.

As far as national identity in typeface design goes, there’s some information on case studies from 1900-1960 at the companion website to the current Face the Nation exhibition. (I’m hoping to get more information from the exhibition added to the website soon.)

Outstanding young New Zealand type designer Kris Sowersby may be the best person to ask. His recent typeface “National” won a prestigious award this year but his Feijoa may be the face you want to look at.

http://www.klim.co.nz/index.php

ChrisL

Hi Lindsay, I am just back from a trip to NZ, so my post is late. Here is a typeface trying to imitate Maori carving - I am not convinced, however!

http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/churchward/maori/familytree.html

Lindsay, this is a stupid project.
If the agenda is diversity and empowerment, just cut to the chase and get more ethnic variety in design schools, and get more agencies and publishers using Kiwi designers and Kiwi-designed typefaces. Mount a campaign against Adobe, Microsoft, and Apple fonts, not to mention Helvetica and all the rest of that old Euro stuff. And good luck with that.

If you get distracted by overt ethnic signifiers, such as those that appear in some of Joseph Churchward’s faces, you will get embroiled in touchy debates over authenticity and appropriation. That kind of face lacks range and is marginal at best, so tying your agenda to its cute banality will fail to address the mainstream of typography.

To move forward, you will have to overcome internationalism at home, and rise on the international stage.
For instance, the Sunday Star Times (in which the article on Kris appeared) was designed by foreigners, using foreign typefaces. That’s a frequent occurence in the newspaper business, everywhere.
But then, when New Zealand publishers have been persuaded that using their own art directors and designers, and Sowersby fonts, won’t put them out of business, the question is, how much do his faces reflect or express local culture, and how much are they the product of an international type culture? It’s irrelevant. More important, if you want to help your own culture express its individuality, support “indie” foundries everywhere, and in particular,

It occurred to me that this line of thinking would be far more interesting/worthwhile if you twist it around to “What makes typefaces relevant in the first place?” For example, why the hell won’t Helvetica go away? Why is Times New Roman, an aging newspaper face, being used for everything from office documents to books? Why is Franklin Gothic so popular all of a sudden? Why do foreign newspaper designers consider foreign typefaces relevant to New Zealanders? Would typefaces by a New Zealander really be any more relevant? Is Bringhurst full of shit when he claims that historically linking type to content is a good idea, given that most people would believe Didot was created the indian slave who did the punchcutting on board the Pinta’s return journey to Spain (or at least I suspect they would believe it given how little most people know about type)?

“Outstanding young New Zealand type designer Kris Sowersby may be the best person to ask. His recent typeface “National” won a prestigious award this year but his Feijoa may be the face you want to look at.”

BAM!

—————
Paul Ducco
Graphic Design Melbourne

Lindsay, this is not a stupid project.

i had a vague recollection about norway having an official
typeface. a quick google search turned up a thesis around a
similar topic:

http://www.showsomeprogress.co.uk/henrik/Henrik%20Fjeldberg.pdf

also found a nice website about the official norwegiean typeface:

http://norway.designmanual.no/print/typography/

jarrod

The Nazis tried to establish blackletter designs as the national face of Germany

They might have done so for some time, but eventually (they were very forward thinking) they figured that as soon as they would have conquered the world (!) they would want everybody (!) to be able to read their orders. Since most of the world wasn’t familiar with blackletter they switched to roman.

@eliason: If I recall correctly from my reading of Metro Letters, sorry for the vagueness, this was a while ago, a participant claimed that the idea of designing a typeface for a ’city’ was perhaps a silly endeavour, that it could not encapsulate the values of a place or culture but rather that it would complement it.

In an obvious manner you see the wide variety of ’Oriental’ or ’Mexican’ typefaces that are probably more representative of the Western appropriator than the culture it is attempting to resemble. That reversal might make for an interesting project as well:

http://www.dafont.com/theme.php?cat=201
http://www.dafont.com/theme.php?cat=203

“Outstanding young New Zealand type d