Just before the massive tsunami struck, I was on vacation in Sri Lanka. During one of my walks through Tangalle, a small town on the southern coast, I came across a tiny shop with school supplies, including several textbooks for learning Sinhalese. The characters in those textbooks looked exquisite, yet they remained a complete enigma to me.
Even today, there are tribes in the Amazon rainforest who perceive us as unfamiliar entities. It’s been suggested that Native Americans wouldn’t last a minute on the Autobahn near Munich. Conversely, a city dweller from the Western world would also struggle to endure in the rainforest.
I’ve attempted to envision how an Amazon Indian might react to something like the latest Shell annual report or the London A to Z map.
It’s likely they would find these completely bewildering. In that small Sri Lankan shop, I felt a bit like that Amazon Indian, though not entirely. I recognized it was a specific language and a schoolbook, written in Sinhalese and translatable. My query at that moment was: what would a graphic representation that remains unintelligible to a Westerner look like? In essence, a script that cannot be translated. It gives the appearance of a script, yet there’s nothing beyond that impression. The meaning, significance, and purpose remain elusive.
With this thought-provoking question in mind, I embarked on designing a script that embodies and retains its sense of mystery. I meticulously crafted the characters, ensuring they genuinely resemble letters.
At first glance, QuinX appears to be a functional script, resembling an unknown language. Some mistake it for Chinese, yet native Chinese speakers cannot read it. Like an unfamiliar alphabet encountered for the first time, it seems to invite translation. But QuinX offers no linguistic foothold, it is purely asemic.
Asemic writing is traditionally created with pen, ink, or brush, embracing fluid, expressive marks. QuinX, however, brings asemic writing into the realm of typography, introducing structure while abandoning conventional readability. It detaches itself from reality, forming a surrealist statement. By discarding the constraints of language, reading direction, letter count, punctuation, uppercase and lowercase distinctions, QuinX allows for complete freedom in typographic expression.
Yet designing a font that looks like a legitimate script without adhering to the rules of readability is a complex challenge. A typeface must still follow certain visual principles: letter spacing, character consistency, the rhythm of words forming lines, and an overall typographic harmony. Though QuinX rejects linguistic function, it respects the aesthetics of lettering.
QuinX resembles a serious, well-crafted typeface, respecting most calligraphic principles. It simulates the texture and rhythm of broad-pen writing, a technique rooted in classical Roman letterforms.
The light, medium, and bold, and natural thick-thin contrast found in Renaissance inscriptions, such as those on the tombs in Santa Croce, Florence.
This approach aligns QuinX with the humanist tradition. Much like Hermann Zapf’s Optima, an elegant typeface bridging classical and modern styles, QuinX embraces calligraphic principles while maintaining a contemporary sans-serif appearance. The final collection consists of 45 letterforms, 12 numerals, and 5 ligatures, all available in three weights. While devoid of meaning, the typeface carries a sense of typographic credibility, making it both surreal and serious.
