Faculty of Design

Graphic Design

Mika Parial

New New Script

The script is heavily inspired by labanotation, a notation system created by Rudolf Laban in 1928. He recorded and scrutinized human movement in order to create a system of communication that would be able to record the physical motions of a dance into something that could be easily read and replicated.It’s a form of dance notation but also sees use in robotics and human movement simulations. It mainly explains the direction and level of movement, the parts of the body during movement, the duration of movement, and the dynamic quality of the movement. There are different positions correlating to the direction in space, and how much a limb must incline, as well as the simultaneous movements and those quickly preceding or following that.A secondary inspiration for the script was morse code which was created to represent letters without using the letters themselves, built primarily to be an alternate way of communication using light when words could not be communicated through either audio or writing. It was eventually picked up by the military to send coded messages. I thought this form of encoding was relevant to my direction as my language is not intended to be read at first glance but decoded and understood for its complexity. I decided to use these models as the basis for my language because I saw there was a real potential for having a set of simple yet complex ‘building blocks’ for the relationships playing out and the societal architecture, more generally, when employing technology to communicate within a community that uses their own evolved language not easily understandable to others.Dots and dashes, dark blocks and light blocks, as well as spacing and a ‘unit’ structure all had graphic qualities that I believed would be a good fit for the language I was creating.

“Created to represent the codified language used in online communities, New New Script is a complicated sequence of blocks in different forms of lines reminiscent of 2d architecture.”