Alphabettes News – July 2016

The Alphabettes are taking a small break from their travels to bring you news from July. We hope to back with monthly updates from this month; wish us luck!

Tribute to Rosemary Sassoon during the 7º Congreso Internacional de Tipografía
At 7º Congreso Internacional de Tipografía held in Valencia (Spain), tribute was paid to Rosemary Sassoon, who is best known for designing the Sassoon series of typefaces specifically for children.

Alphabettes at 6th International Conference on Typography & Visual Communication (ICTVC)
At the 6th International Conference on Typography & Visual Communication (ICTVC), which was held in Thessaloniki (Greece), Liron Lavi Turkenich presented a talk on the subject Latinised Hebrew, Radical anecdotes in search for solutions, and also joined Laura Meseguer, Luisa Baeta, Bianca Berning, Alessia Mazzarella for a panel discussion on Collaborative practices in typeface design.

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Greetings from Goa

It can be quite the cliché to mention the cultural diversity in a country as large as India, but sometimes, the obvious deserves repeating, especially when it can be supplemented with photographs of beautiful shop signs and house nameplates. In order to demonstrate this, I invite you to join me in Goa, the smallest of India’s twenty-nine states, well-known for its beaches, parties and electronic music festivals.

Unlike the majority of the country, the state of Goa wasn’t a colony of the British. The Portuguese arrived here in the early 1500s and Goa remained under their control till 1961 when it was annexed by India after military action. Interestingly, it was 1556 in Goa that the first printing press from the West arrived in India. Over 450 years of Portuguese rule has left its mark here and it is easy to spot in the architecture and lettering, especially in neighbourhoods like Fontainhas, an old Latin Quarter in the state capital Panjim.

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Greetings from Haifa

How is it possible that it’s August again??? This summer, we wanted you to travel with us (for free!) around the world and enjoy some typographic curiosities we have around us (check out this map by Indra). Those posts will be scattered throughout the month, marked with a passport stamp on the first image for quicker spotting. This is a perfect excuse for a tomato juice! Here we go:

Scripts don’t live in a void. They live together, interlaced, in Israel’s urban environment: Hebrew, Arabic and English. Each script is affected by surrounding scripts, which in turn influences them back, a symbiotic relationship. Examining trilingual signage in Haifa provides an opportunity to discover meaning among the different alphabets; an additional benefit is that it is a good excuse to show some of what surrounds me in my hometown.

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My 2¢

Over the past 10 days, we’ve traveled around the world to learn more about the design of coins, banknotes and money-related artifacts. While we strayed a bit from entirely type-specific content, the series connects visual culture, personal stories and collective experiences in some [hopefully] interesting ways. In case you missed any of the posts, we have conveniently gathered them all here.

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My 2¢: From Hendecagonal to Round

For a brief spell in the 90s, I fancied myself as a coin collector. The interest didn’t last too long, but I did end up with a few old Indian coins that I still like, including a 1945 pice that has a hole punched in the middle. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that I was in primary school, but I was very fond of coins with interesting shapes, like the 1p, 10p and 20p coins. There is little wonder then that my all-time favourite coin was the ₹2 one—it was a hendecagonal (or an 11-sided polygon), and I saw it and used it everyday.

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Coins of denomination 1 pice (1945), 1p (1965), 10p (1986), 20p (1987) and ₹2 (2000)

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My 2¢: 1 & 2 Rupee

shelley_2Rupee_coin

Travelling to India changed my relationship with money. When there, I am suddenly in possession of wads of bills in denominations of multiple zeros that I could never hope to ever see, let alone hold. Rupee coins are not as much a part of my experience there, and use them as other Indians do, to give money to people on the street or tips to drivers.

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My 2¢: No Pockets in a Shroud?

In Hong Kong, I have seen several small stores selling colourful replica of contemporary luxury made by paper, spread all over the mega city. Mimicked handbags of must-have brands, smartphones and even favourite dishes of Hong Kong dining are artfully recreated, and sold to be offered to ancestors by burning the paper artefacts. From time to time, I observed people burning the offerings in metal barrels at the backstreets.

A small store for paper offerings at Sheung Wan, Hong Kong.

A small store for paper offerings at Sheung Wan, Hong Kong.

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My 2¢: Cuba’s 2 Currencies

My 2¢ is less about the design of these two Cuban banknotes than about what they represent.

As a US-dwelling Canadian who has wanted to visit Cuba for many years, I finally made the trip there from Toronto in early 2015 — ironically, just after the announcement of the normalization of relations with the US.

Cuba is a striking and remarkable place in so many ways. But one of the things that struck me most upon arriving there was the discovery that since 1994 Cuba has had two parallel currencies: the Cuban Peso (CUP), which is used for trade among Cubans; and the Convertible Cuban Peso (CUC), which is used by visitors to the country and for international trade, and is pegged to the US dollar. So 1 CUC equals 1 USD — and 1 CUC equals approximately 25 CUP.

A 3-peso note from the international, convertible Cuban currency, the CUC.

A 10-peso note from the local Cuban currency, the CUP.

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