1. ACCESSIBILITY

Typography is a very small niche, filled with people drawn into it by passion for its uniqueness. And yet, its products are used and seen by everyone, all the time, everywhere. Trying to understand this field and/or pursue research about any topic related to the field isn’t equally accessible to everyone, in both physical and ideological sense of the term “accessible.” That is the main reason why we chose the form of a website for Words of Type Encyclopedia, so it can be accessed from everywhere at anytime. We also take great care of the descriptions in each language, covering the major aspects of each term, accompanied by illustrations to help visualize their meaning and understand them easily.

2. ACCURATE & SIMPLE

Being a professional in typography requires extensive knowledge if one wishes to create work consciously. For some topics, one may even need to get on a somewhat academic journey with research crossing multiple fields. But it is possible to introduce the great variety of aspects in and around typography in an easy way, which could also help those who are interested into one to dig deeper (and eventually even achieve a PhD degree!). Making such knowledge more accessible and simple can also broaden the “audience” of people interested in typography, because, again, it is in everyone’s life!

3. EQUAL QUALITY

From the multitude of ressources available, off and online, the quality of typographic terms descriptions is not consistent across different languages. It is more abundant in English and about the script used by it: Latin alphabet, which results into an unbalanced amount of knowledge across this international field. Having a common language definitely faciliates international exchange. But we believe that it is up to the industry to evolve and adapt to its people, not the other way round, and that it could only be to the benefit of everyone.

4. WORDS FOR HUMANS

One might think that using AI—especially today—would be the perfect time-and-money-saving solution for the translation work. But anyone who has had some experience with cross-language communication knows that relying on translation tools can’t always give accurate results. And with a vocabulary that has so much context as the one used in typography (historical, conceptual, cultural, etc.), it is important to make sure that the person you are talking to understands the full scope of a word, thus, what you are talking about. Some terms in some languages even have non-existent translations into others, which will need in depth discussion and research to “invent” those, so that more tools are in our boxes for working, teaching, and learning.

5. DIVERSITY & DISCOVERY

Since quite some time now, there has been a growing interest and need multiscriptual and/or multilingual typography. A lot has been said, studied, experimented, and conceptualized about typography with Latin alphabet. But for the so-called “non-Latin” scripts, resources written in the languages using them are rare, and even more so in English (if not simply unavailable), making them difficult to approach for anyone not using the same language or script. We need more content introducing the diversity of our typography universe(s), available and accessible to more people, so everyone gets to discover what others have to offer and develop their skills (and wisdom).

6. SHARE & CULTIVATE

Today, communication is key. Mutual understanding has never been so important in every field, including typography and graphic design. Even if one doesn’t necessary need to understand everything down to the smallest detail, getting enough information can already be sufficient to begin a solid and respectful collaboration with experts, and achieve meaningful work together. There are incredible possibilities for mutual inspiration and enrichment, from learning and discovering how other cultures approach typography in their own script. And Words of Type aims to nudge these a little bit closer.

“We often fear what we do not understand; our best defense is knowledge” — Tuvok, from Star Trek Voyager.

7. LEARN, PRACTICE, MEET

In parallel to the encyclopedia, we want to offer accessible opportunities to learn and practice from experts in specific topics with lectures, workshops, and articles, available on Words of Type Platform. Thanks to our modern world today, we can use the technologies and tools at our reach to facilitate such effort. Our Community has been created with this goal in mind (in between the idealistic and realistic), and hopefully, it will be a place that helps to make it happen. The community is also where members are invited to meet each other, as a complementary space to typography festivals across the world, off and online.