This is definitely my favourite project, the one I enjoyed the most and I worked on with endless effort and enthusiasm. It, actually, started a long time ago, during my exchange programme in Barcelona when some friends of mine and I organized an exhibition around the concept of communication. On that occasion I started to develop a strong interest in linguistics and typography. I did some research on the relationship between written and spoken language and started to write my dissertation on this issue. Additionally I wanted to explore on a purely graphic and visual level the connection between alphabetic and phonetic system and for this reason I started playing around with the shapes of the characters of both alphabets. What is interesting about them is that these two ways to record speech are both the result of human conventions. They are symbols to which we gave meaning, and considering Derrida’s evaluation on written language we can say that they share the same ideographic value. Punctuation marks, fonts and spacing between words have no phonetic connotation and sometimes do not add any extra meaning to the written text but are actually ideographic symbols with embedded meaning. The phonetic alphabet was invented to fill the gaps of the regular alphabet in recording the spoken language. It is, actually, nothing more than a extension of our common alphabet.
With this project I decided to show the purely graphic value of the two considered systems. Using the 26 characters and some of the glyphs available in a sans serif font like Helvetica I tried to produce a brand new version of a phonetic alphabet. It was quite a long process during which I played with alphabetical shapes, cutting and superimposing them one upon another in order to obtain new combinations of phonetic symbols.
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