Speaker Mark De Winne

For more than a century, Singapore was an important port town within the British Empire before it rose to prominence as a island city state within the South East Asian region. The typographic vernacular of Singapore bears traces of the various indigenous and migrant communities that form its multicultural core. Our focus will be on hand-lettered commercial signboards from the 1940s to 80s as sieved from archival photographs. These signboards capture the multilingual landscape and a visual history of Singapore’s fast-changing economic landscape, as it emerged from World War II, experienced rapid urban redevelopment and emerged as an ‘economic miracle’ by the early 1990s. By combining archival photographs with present-day photo-documentation, this project is an attempt to discover typologies, styles, and motifs that characterise a ‘Singapore Gothic’ in the same spirit that one can ascribe a typographic flavour to global cities like New York, London or Tokyo. A sample of languages and scripts covered include English, Chinese, Romanised Malay, Jawi, and Tamil. This project is a collaboration between type designer Mark De Winne and design educator Vikas Kailankaje.