Anyone who has gone down the rabbit hole of studying typography has probably been guided in the direction of learning type as shape, and training the eye to see letters for the empty space around them — what we call negative space.

Of course, this is just the beginning. The wild world of type is riddled with intricacies that bring incredible nuance to written communication. (For curious nerds like me, I highly recommend the book Just My Type by Simon Garfield.)

My time as a Brand Designer has taught me many lessons about the personalities of type, but my starkest lessons date back to 2015 when I lived in Thailand.

Throwing spaghetti

At the time, I was commuting between Bangkok for school and Chang Mai for a project designing product labels for a sustainable farm and learning center. The farm had a cafe that was attempting to bring their products to local stores, and resultantly needed labels for their drinks and goodies. The catch? Each label needed to be translated in both English and Thai.

I, only being able to speak the tiniest bit of Thai (enough to get a lot of confused looks as I messed up the tones and was entirely incoherent), and able to write absolutely nothing, worked closely with one of the cafe workers to create and translate the necessary text. Neither one of us fluent in the other’s language, this process was dynamic and full of giggles, to say the least.

At first, choosing a typeface that communicated Thai characters the same way I was attempting to communicate in English felt like throwing spaghetti at a wall to see what stuck. Eventually, I started to recognize patterns and lean on my new friend as my eyes and ears for Thai language and culture. Having zero comprehension of the meaning of written characters, I had no choice but to learn letters as shapes.

Reading vs. seeing

Then, I went back to school. I went back to design briefs and classroom critiques, and started observing how my Thai classmates chose and assessed English letter forms. I realized that my own competency in English was guarding me from understanding typography.

I was reading; my classmates were seeing.

What I walked away with was a curiosity for new perspectives, and an embrace of feeling like a child discovering something new about the world. Communication is so much more than words.

I was mystified by this newfound appreciation, and also completely overwhelmed by sheer abundance. Walking around Victory Monument, Bangkok’s main transportation hub for the country and where I would go each time I commuted between Bangkok and Chiang Mai, was incredibly anxiety-inducing as countless screens and posters filled every space in sight. Banners seemed to scream, and video advertisements literally did.

It was so much visual overload that I adopted a rather minimalistic design style. For one of our school projects, we were tasked with creating a brochure. I thought this rather frustrating, given that all too many brochures already existed and I had no desire to make another.

So, my submission consisted of a near blank piece of paper with perforation in the bottom two centimeters. Above the perforation line was a small image of a tree, and below was a line of text that read “This is not a tree. This is the image of a tree. What you’re holding was a real one. You can’t save the tree that made this paper, but you can save the next one. Save a tree, stop picking up pamphlets.” The text could be ripped away by the perforation, so all that was left was a blank piece of paper that could be used again.

(For those of you that caught it — yes, it was a spin off of Rene Magritte’s ceci n’est pas un pipe.)

Discovering rivers

Simply existing and interacting in a whole new world — queue Aladdin — meant that the simplest means of communication I had learned as a child, letters, gained an entirely new meaning. I learned that less is more, space is valuable, and consumption includes information. I learned that our world is a series of shapes, and the lens we wear will color translation.

I now fondly admire the rhythm of type. I admire the flow of the forms, and the rivers of white between each shape.

I wonder what children experience when they see a sign. I wonder what my Thai friends would think of the subway, and how my world at home is just as curious.