Languages are a means of communication with their own writing systems and character structures. However, when these visual differences are made more obvious with the inconsistent typographic choices between the English and Chinese language in bilingual posters, it obstructs how information is understood and navigated when these languages are placed together.
Anchored on the pillars of education and archival, Types Unite aims to investigate how the English and Chinese writing systems can form a cohesive visual system for designers to be more sensitive while designing bilingual posters for Singapore, a multilingual society.
In the face of life transitions, young adults are particularly susceptible to loneliness, which may lead to a deterioration in physical and mental health. By encouraging young adults to connect with themselves, their community and the surrounding natural environment, Oasis aims to provide resources and tools to tackle both external causes and internal emptiness. This digital platform is an all-in-one companion that facilitates mood tracking, friendship establishment and nature-related experiences that nurtures social and nature connectedness.
I undertook With Lots of Love to gain a deeper understanding of the plethora of conflicting emotions that I feel towards my mother, with the hope that through the process of engaging my mother in the project, that we will both begin a healing journey.
For this project, concurrently I sieved through our belongings to compare our preferences, and showcased our differing opinions through reenacting our day-to-day encounters. Both acts, one of comparing our personal belongings revealed my mother and I are more alike than different in our preferences, whilst the other of examining my mother’s dislike over my dressing choices, came together to shed light into our contentious relationship.
It is also a milestone for me, a sense of emancipation as I transmit the emotions that I feel of this difficult mother-daughter relationship into a visual form and writing.
With Lots of Love was not created with the intention to change my mother’s preferences or beliefs, but to open up space for potential conversation between my mother and I.
Reliving Tales of Angami Naga is a collaborative project between William Liu Rui Qian, a back-end coding developer student from the faculty of Engineering in Information Engineering and Media at Nanyang Technological University, and myself, assuming the role of designer and animator. This project is guided by the SoH, ADM, and EEE teams as part of Professor Joan Marie Kelly and Professor Alexander Robertson Coupe’s eight-year partnership to sustain and support the development of literacy in endangered languages.
Of the 170 or so minority languages at risk in India, half are Tibeto-Burman languages primarily spoken in regions such as Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland in North-East India. The impending loss of these languages would be catastrophic, resulting in the loss of cultural heritage and linguistic knowledge.
Reliving Tales of Angami is a Pixel Role Playing Game (RPG) designed to promote the Tenyidie language and cultural heritage of the Angami Tribe in Nagaland to a global audience, with a particular focus on younger Angami generations. We heavily rely on Tenyidie folktales as a medium to facilitate the narrative and impart cultural knowledge in the game. We aspire to inspire similar efforts globally towards adopting adaptive and sustainable design approaches for the preservation of language and culture.
Buta Huruf is a contemporary Jawi typeface inspired by the calligraphic styles of early Jawi publications in Singapore.
In an increasingly connected world, we have a wider access to different languages that are present to us in contexts in which we are unfamiliar with. This is especially true for languages that do not use the Latin script such as Jawi, the writing system for the Malay language. Despite Singaporeans’ familiarity with the Malay language, rarely do we see the usage of Jawi in daily life with the Rumi script being the official script. This absence is extended to type design, a realm in which Jawi is often overlooked. As a multilingual designer, I wanted to explore Jawi typography, a non-Latin script to design for the writing system with regards to its unique identity and as a way to gain a further understanding of my own cultural heritage.
