Unicode 11.0 (June 2018) covers exactly 146 writing systems. That’s an important milestone for worldwide communication and typography. But what about the missing scripts? How many of them are still out there? What do they look like? In the first step of the Missing Scripts Project, we developed a typographic overview of all writing systems. Dr. Deborah Anderson from UC Berkeley provided data with all their names, their regions, and timeframes. At ANRT, Nancy, and Hochschule Mainz, we researched and designed a reference glyph for each of these writing systems. In the presentation, we will discuss the question of universal form principles, research of non-Latin systems and the design process of the glyphs. We will show different ways of systematisation of the world’s writing systems and present the outcome. During the conference we will publish a silkscreen poster with 292 glyphs, representing all 292 known writing systems of the world, together with their names, regions, and timeframes. This is a joint project by the Atelier National de Recherche Typographique (ANRT, Nancy, France, the Institut Designlabor Gutenberg (IDG) at Hochschule Mainz, Germany, and the Script Encoding Initiative (SEI) at the Department of Linguistics at UC Berkeley, USA.
The missing scripts project
Johannes Bergerhausen
Prof. Johannes Bergerhausen, born 1965 in Bonn, Germany, studied Communication Design at the University of Applied Sciences in Düsseldorf. From 1993 to 2000, he lived and worked in Paris. First he collaborated with the Founders of Grapus, Gérard Paris-Clavel and Pierre Bernard, then he founded his own office. In 1998 he was awarded a grant from the French Centre National des Arts Plastiques for a typographic research project on the ASCII-Code. He returned to Germany in 2000 and, since 2002, is Professor of Typography at the University of Applied Sciences in Mainz. Lectures in Amiens, Beirut, Berlin, Brussels, Dubai, Frankfurt, London, Malta, Paris, Prague, Rotterdam, San Francisco, Sofia, Weimar. Since 2004, he is working on the decodeunicode.org project, supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, which went online in 2005. Semester of research 2007 in Paris. In 2012, he was awarded with the Designpreis in Gold of the Federal Republic of Germany. He is currently working on a digital cuneiform font.