A font called Kenya
on Colm in Kenya (Kenya), 22/May/2009 05:09, 34 days ago
I used to work with a graphic designer / alpha geek type guy called Tim and let me state from the start that he was far too comfortable with his geekyness for my liking. He was bespectacled with mousy brown hair, too much brill cream and a domineering nose. He was an excellent creative designer whose ambition he openly confessed to me was to design his own new font (You see what I mean, way too comfortable with his geekyness).But it turns out that designing a unique new font is quite the challenge, a graphic designers’ Everest.It’s not just creating a unique design for each individual letter he explained, you have to consider how each of the 26 letters sit together. Each has to agree, meet, mix and match perfectly – upper caps and lower caps, Aa must agree with Zz and the ones in between so that they ‘communicated’the same message like a meticulously rehearsed choir.Take the ubiquitous Arial for example– it’s so popular because no letter looks out of sink with any other. They all sing clearly together, none falling out line or tune. Arial’s communication objective is formal clarity and is tremendously successful in achieving this.The more Tim explained, with unsettling passion, the greater I understood the mammoth task involved in creating a new font.So if creating fonts are difficult, imagine a new font whose objective was to reflect a modern prosperous Kenya– well it would perhaps be impossible.Sure some groups of letters would get together and agree a design that reflected their historic, family and geographical preferences, but they could not find an agreeable font that would reflect all these ties in one Kenyan font.If one were to demonstrate these difficulties and illustrate this new fictional font, let us first group all agreeable designs together. Then lets name each of the groups.Therefore, we would propose the new font would look like this:By assigning such firm separation and classification, our demonstration and analysis can be more manageable* and we can thus clearly see that because of the evident disagreements in design the new font would be hopelessly unworkable. Each group of letters would magnificently fail to unite behind one message or objective.To illustrate further, lets pluck a few randomly chosen words from the air and see this new Kenyan font in action:You see! A disaster. By using the assigned letter grouping in this new font, the‘word’ government looks messy, hard to understand and in eternal disagreement, some of the groupings dominate and some are barely represented.It is an appalling, incoherent, self-serving squalor.Tim was right when he eulogised the complicated procedure in designing a new font– it takes an almost impossible amount of work, dedication and clarity of focus. But when you start grouping letters together not as one but to create deep separation, the size of the task is multiplied. It would take a strong mind to bring them all together.It’s a job even beyond the likes of Tim, the fucking^ weirdo he is.*Of course colonists didn't create tribalism. Tribes existed in Kenya since almost forever, when Liverpool were last champions. But before Europeans came, the tribes lived in near complete harmony, each relying on the other when needed.It was when the colonists came that they enhanced the divisions between tribes by reassigning roles and land within the community ignoring centuries of organic development. This separation was done to allow the rulers to manage and control groups more effectively. The divisions and colonial created identities still exist day with dreadful consequences.^Like a Barbara Cartland novel, there had to be one fuck in there right!Dedicated to the wonderful Mike Foyle RIP