Mark Jamra 
Neil Patel You’re interested in designing type for communities outside of your world and culture, but where do you start?
Thirteen years ago, we were getting interested too, and since then, we’ve acquired a lot of experience in designing fonts and typeface systems for many of the writing systems in Africa. Quite a few of these writing systems were neographies, i.e. scripts that have been invented, as opposed to writing systems that evolved through a centuries-long process of historical influences.
Communities or individuals invent writing systems for various reasons. Whether the reason is to better reflect the phonological or grammatical features of their language, embrace the visual culture of their communities, or regain control over post-colonial or majority group language policies. The goal is always for these writing systems to achieve recognition and support as mainstream scripts. Neographies are intrinsically political and socio-economical in nature.
In this presentation, we’ll look at the vital considerations type designers must make when working with neographies to best serve the communities and their aspirations. We’ll be sharing stories, ideas and personal suggestions about: designing the right type at the right time, contacting and working with language community leaders, working with encoded and unencoded systems, determining design parameters and who is responsible for what in establishing visual character and form. We’ll also share some experiences in working with applications that facilitate neographies, like input methods and machine translation.
Finally, we’ll talk about what happens after the design work is finished, something that type designers don’t immediately think about, but which is an essential component of meaningfully supporting a language community in their quest to achieve digital parity.