More Than Just A Hand
The brief was to create a typographically led integrated graphic design campaign that celebrates a community.
People communicate through intricate and dynamic messages, the Deaf community is no exception to this. Experiencing our world differently, a rich and dynamic culture has developed. Transforming their bodies into stages of story telling, their language is deeply emotive and visually expressive.
Driven by a desire to capture this essence we developed the “Not just a hand,” to be launched during deaf awareness week. We aimed to acknowledge and celebrate the deaf community, redefining typography through the exploration and incorporation of sign language, vibrations and cultural identity; elements often overlooked in other examples of sign language based typography.
“More than just a hand” is a font that has been created to represent the and expressive language of the deaf community; through the exploration of movement, hand shape, formation, cymatics (sound waves) and subtitles. Focusing on fingerspelling, the typography overlays photographs of movement, cymatics (sound waves) and lino print inspired illustrations to capture the idea of visual expressions; creating a new representation of South African sign language (SASL).
A series of posters with positive and inclusive messages for the deaf and hearing communities in both hearing and deaf spaces, with the aim of showcasing the font while providing an opportunity to practise basic sign language/fingerspelling by using the poster as a guide.
The font is free for download from the Monotype website, with the option to create a special message as a shareable GIF that can be sent across social media.
Murals in both deaf specific and public spaces inspired by the dynamic, “storytelling” nature of the language, with positive messages to celebrate and highlight community pride while encouraging social interaction.
