As part of the Biennale internationale de design graphique 2021, le Signe is pleased to announce our summer school Faire Parler les Lettres (Let Letters Speak) with Naïma Ben Ayed from 14 to 18 July in Chaumont, preceded by two short sessions by video conference on Tuesday 8 and 29 June  at 18:30 o'clock CET.

This summer school is open to students in graphic design and typography as well as professionals interested in script cohabitation as well as lettering and type design.

Letterforms are not neutral. They  convey  (hi)stories and cultures.

This workshop is located at the intersection between language and letterforms.

The French language contains many words of foreign origin, namely words that come from writing systems other than Latin, such as Arabic or Greek.
What are these words’ itineraries? How did they get into the French language,  from one alphabet to another one?

We will invest these questions through letterform design.

Each participant will create a digital lettering in Latin letters starting from a word chosen from a different language/ writing system.*

This workshop is an invitation to experiment with the notion of typographic matchmaking, i.e. the visual harmonisation of different writing systems. 

All of these created letterings will become one page of a collective booklet printed by risograph and a series of posters.

This workshop is open to graphic and type design students as well as professionals particularly interested in the cohabitation of  scripts and type design. We will be using Glyphs software.

*Naïma Ben Ayed is specialised in Arabic type design, yet any writing system that is familiar enough to the participants and in which they can bring together a corpus of graphic and typographic references will be welcomed.

Registration to this summer school is free of charge.
For further information, contact
Susanne Schroeder
susanne.schroeder@cndg.fr
+33 603 101 749