“‘More Consistent and Systematic Than Any Form of Writing I Know’: Kurt Schwitters’s Systemschrift”, Robin Fuller2014 (typography; backlinks)⁠:

Herbert Bayer, Jan Tschichold and several other modernist typographers demanded that the alphabet be redesigned in order to represent speech more faithfully, yet Kurt Schwitters’s Systemschrift was the only such experiment that pursued to the end the modernist typographers’ rally cry of ‘one sound, one sign’.

To achieve this, Schwitters rejected the standard characters of the Latin alphabet and designed entirely new symbols informed by phonetic analysis of speech sounds.

Further, Systemschrift included aspects of non-arbitrary signification through imagery; the characters can be interpreted as depictions of the articulatory positions of the vocal organ.

In so doing, Schwitters emulated experiments conducted by 19^th-century English phoneticians. [eg. Gabelsberger shorthand]

[Keywords: typography, phonetic Transcription, Kurt Schwitters, Jan Tschichold]

See Also:

• ‘An Unused Esperanto’: Internationalism and Pictographic Design, 1930^–₄₀1970_54ya

• What’s in a Font?: Ideological Perceptions of Typography

• Writing is a technology that restructures thought

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