The fifth poster in this ever-extending series, which began with The Annex of Universal Languages, was initiated by Akiem Helmling, the curator of Alphabetum in The Hague. This poster was created in collaboration with Tim Brookes from Endangered Alphabets, who researched and wrote the 20 dream-stories presented in this publication.

From September 6, 2025 to January 25, 2026, Alphabetum hosted an exhibition of the same name, where the illustrations, writing systems, and their creation myths were presented. The translucent flags created a dreamscape that invited the audience to browse through and become immersed in the work.

In creating this poster, I prioritized Noto Sans and Serif versions of the writing systems where available, secondly looked to existing Unicode proposals, and as a last resort, quickly digitized blurry images. Eleven of the 20 alphabets and syllabaries have already been added to the Noto type family, while others had Unicode proposals clean enough to use. In the case of Bété, I reached out to ANRT alumnus Adam Yeo, who provided me with his digital interpretation of Frédéric Bruly Bouabré’s handwritten script.

The poster has been offset printed – locally in the Netherlands – with Pantone Gold and Black and was mechanically folded by a bookbinder in Haarlem.

Like the other parts of the series, this edition also uses my typeface Logical which, thanks to its inclusion of icons that can be transformed from words, initiated this whole adventure. Handing a specimen of Logical to Richard Niessen in 2018 caused him to invite me to participate in his Palace of Typographic Masonry by adding a new room. Logical has been released by Bold Monday and combines the warmth and legibility of humanist typefaces with the technical look of typefaces like DIN and Isonorm. Its markdown-inspired syntax to transform words into icons via OpenType features makes them easily accessible even in software without a glyphs palette. The underline feature, which ensures that descenders are not cut off, also gets heavy use in the referenced links below each panel.

The view when entering Alphabetum in The Hague. The publicly accessible library invites visitors to read books, have a coffee, or discuss language with others. Its brutalist yet warm architecture makes every visit to Alphabetum an enriching experience.

The poster side of the panel illustrates 20 out of 22 visions displayed in the exhibition.

Each of the 20 panels describes an origin story of the writing system presented below. The small number in the top right indicates the number of active users.

Another view of the exhibition in Alphabetum with the beautiful Foscarini Allegro Assai suspension lamp.

Behind the flags, each writing system is featured on two black A3 panels. On the left, the text and information provided by Tim Brookes; on the right, an example or the full set of glyphs.

The series of symbol language maps has been extended by one important update at the beginning of 2025. This extension was requested by the Palace of Typographic Masonry for the exhibition at Museum Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt. What started with an overview of attempts to universal languages with The Annex of Universal Languages has been refined with a folded poster that maps out twenty attempts to communicate with images rather than scripts. Many of the creators of these systems belief in the universality of images that might bind people rather then divide them. A pasigraphy (from Greek πᾶσι pasi “to all”, “universal and γράφω grapho “to write”) is a writing system that should be able to communicate without much learning effort. The universal ideographic and pictographic symbols are supposed to be understood naturally by people with different cultural backgrounds.

For the first time I brought in a co-artist who provided the illustrations for the map. The multifaceted artist Quenton Miller approached me to help him with his own image-based language system, when I was starting my research for this new extension. Together we created the “Spiral of Babel”, a reconjuring of the failed Tower of Babel, that ended with the division of people through their languages. Quenton created a fitting illustration for each system, sometimes by portraying their creator, other times by mixing their existing iconography or even by connecting both attempts. The spiral peeks in One Universal Language symbolised by a globe with a heart on top, reminding of the globus cruciger, also known as stavroforos sphaira.

Some of the fonts featured on here like Blissymbolics have been featured before. But others like Earth Language and Sitelen Pona are new additions to Fonts in Use.

The full list of contents:
01 — SAFO by Andre Eckart, 1943–1956
02 — Picot by Karl J.A. Janson, 1938–1958
03 — Semantography of Blissymbolics by Charles K Bliss, 1954
04 — LoCoS by Yukio Ota
05 — Language of Space, a UI by Ph.D. John W. Weilgart, 1964
06 — Écriture universelle by Jean Effel, 1968
07 — AAC (Augmented & Alternative Communication), Widgit, PCS and ARASAAC
08 — Symbol Language by Pati Hill, 1977–1978
09 — Worldsign by David Orcutt, 1984
10 — The Elephants Memory by Timothée Ingen-Housz, 1993
11 — Pictoperanto by Jochen Gros, 1993
12 — Zlango – Pic Talk by Yoav Lorch, 2004
13 — Metacom by Annette Kitzinger, 2004
14 — Sitelen Pona by Sonja Lang, 2013
15 — IKON by Cesco Reale, 2015 (2009?)
16 — NOBEL Universal Graphic Language by Milan Randić, 1984–2009
17 — Earth Language by Yoshiko McFarland, 1992
18 — TUQTULI f.k.a. Icon Spell by Juli Gudehus, 2020

The poster can be ordered directly from The Palace of Typographic Masonry or from Bold Monday, the foundry that published the typeface Logical.

The Spiral of Babel, sorting the icons of different language-systems by completeness and potential. The higher on the winding path, the better. This has been done without empirical data but rather by gut-feeling of the two creators.

The layout of the front page, with 18 icons arranged on five lines in a circular shape, is fitting the other three posters of the series. The layout and colours of the first map have been inspired by Adrian Frutiger’s Symbole Zeichen – Wanderung, a map-shaped publication that points to the non-linear nature of its content and invites the reader to wander.

The text page of the map introduces 20 languages wherefrom three have to share one of the 18 panels available. The AAC (Augmentative and Alternative Communication) languages compiled in section 07 are building on top of each other and share many similarities.

This is probably the first use of NN Arosa after its release at the Swiss foundry Nouvelle Noire. The constructed shapes of Arosa perfectly match the custom designed Dendemann logo that I created in 2015. The German rapper asked for a more robust and mainstream logo that could compete with other festival headliners. Before that, we used ever switching logos inspired by hip-hop culture and metal. Some of them can still be seen here on my website.

The photograph is taken in Berlin with the Siegessäule in the background, by Nils Müller, a former graffiti artist from Hamburg who taught himself photography so that he could immortalize his own work. Therefore, it is nice to see these posters, back in Hamburg-St. Pauli, on tagged and spray-painted walls.

Posterwall at Hain-Hoyer Straße in the Hamburg red-light district, very close to where I used to live and outside of a bar that I visited two or three times.

The movie title uses Zangezi Condensed.

This was probably one of my most fun projects in 2023. Artist and filmmaker Josefin Arnell approached me for the credits for her new zombie/vampire movie BUURTHUIS II. The story revolves around the infamous community center in Amsterdam Wittenburg that was the crime scene of a mistargeted deadly shooting in 2018.

Director Arnell worked with the community in script writing workshops and included them as actors in her submission for the Prix de Rome 2023. The result is an absurdist political horror movie that deals with gentrification and blood sucking capitalism.

After she approached me, I researched classic horror typefaces that are used in John Carpenter’s movies or other 1980s classics. Typefaces like ITC Quorum, Albertus, Flange or Romic. (ITC Benguiat had to stay home, due to overuse after being prominently featured in Stranger Things). But I included some fresh Future Fonts typefaces by three female type designers I admire. Messer by Inga Plönnigs, Silverspoon by Diana Ovezea and Zangezi by Daria Cohen (f.k.a. Daria Petrova). These fonts were also used by Josefin Arnell in her design for the movie posters, and paired with Zombie Monster by Rayvaldo Rizki Pratama Augusta.

For the subtitles, editor Lukas Heistinger contacted me, asking for a recommendation that is well readable on screen yet able to compete with the exciting typeface in the credits. From several recommendations the freely available closed source typeface Author, designed by Satya Rajpurohit and published at his Fontshare, was the the final choice.

The movie was presented at Prix de Rome 2023 at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. More context on the show and BUURTHUIS II can be read at Tangents.art

Movie posters, designed by Josefin Arnell, using Zangezi (stretched), Silverspoon Italic and Zombie Monster.

Credits using both upright and italic styles of Zangezi

Captions by editor Lukas Heistinger, set in Author

In the midst of the 12th century, a German Benedictine abbess of Rupertsberg, St. Hildegard von Bingen, invented a vocabulary called Lingua Ignota – Latin for “unknown language” – it is one of the oldest invented languages. Its purpose is unclear, speculations reach from secret cipher to universal language. What’s certain is that Hildegard is its author. Since Lingua Ignota only lists 1001 nouns, it is rather a ‘lexique’ than an actual language. The accompanying Litterae Ignotae – Latin for “unknown letters” – are often wrongly attributed as the letters used to write Lingua Ignota, while a lack of the three letters j, v and w points to a use in Latin.

After being invited by Akiem Helmling of Alphabetum to create a contemporary sans-serif revival of Litterae Ignotae, one following the characteristics of my typeface Logical, I immediately felt excited about this steep challenge. It brought together my interest in universal languages and optimal typeface legibility. For the past several years, I have explored these topics through the abstracted symbols included in Logical, and through other exhibition and research projects.

To give such a revival the fairest and most informed treatment, I needed to consult as many original manuscripts as possible. Enthusiastically planning a research trip to Bingen in the German Rhineland, it turned out that the actual sites where Hildegard lived had very little by way of documentation – barely any written examples of Litterae Ignotae survive today – and there was likewise little material online.

The poster displays the glossary of 1001 words written in Lingua Ignota, Old Latin, Old German, English, and Litterae Ignotae. All information is set in Logical.

Alphabetum is an initiative by Akiem Helmling at the contemporary art center West Den Haag. An artistic space to explore the formative and formal aspect of language and that has a ever growing collection of books and artefacts.

The poster can be ordered at Bold Monday, the foundry that published the Logical typeface designed by Edgar Walthert.

Reissue for the new Amsterdam based label Vintage Voudou.

One of Ghana’s most sought-after LPs emerges from obscurity on high quality reissue. First released in Nigeria in 1979, this LP is a unique collaboration with Themba ‘T-fire’ Matebese, who propelled Basa Basa’s sound – inspired by Ghanaian traditional music, soul and afrobeat – into another dimension, adding disco elements, synthesizers and the production aesthetics of the next decade. Contains extensive liner notes and a 60×60 cm poster of the cover art.

Rather than using the original cover from 1979’s Together We Win, the label decided to go for the Dutch release from 1983 featuring the iconic illustration of one of the band members’ wives, Susan E. St. George, complete with the title in all-caps Marvin. All text except of HOMOWO is re-set in two versions of Futura. As in the original, the display sizes use URW’s Futura No. 2, while the text is set in Bitstream’s BT Futura that provides better readable proportions in the lowercase letters.

Production by Edo Bouman, research and liner notes by Thomas Gesthuizen aka DJ Gioumanne.

For his Germany tour, Dendemann produced a series of merchandise inspired by Demna Gvasalia’s fashion brand Vetements. If Gavaslia blatantly dares to steals from street-culture and adapt it to high fashion, let’s boldly steal back. #HipHop-Culture

The design and production was done by Bravado Merchandise a division of Universal Music GmbH in collaboration with Björn Lindner (cancer/tags) and Edgar Walthert (typography).

Shirts, hoodies, and caps can be bought in the shop at dendemann.com.

The print on the font of the fanny pack is the German translation of belt pouch – GÜRTELTASCHE. The belt itself reads SCHULTERGURT, German for shoulder-belt.

The tour shirt has been “vintaged” in a manual process, a technique first developed for the merchandise of Vom Vintage Verweht. The technique involves rubbing over a laser-print onto another surface with the help of solvent, such as aceton.

Welcome to The Palace of Typographic Masonry, somewhere between the Departments of Sign and Symbol, in The Annex of Universal Languages. Here you will find a small display of attempts to design a visual language that can be universally read, from ideographic systems to all-connecting lingua franca, from utopian alphabets to iconic sign languages.

According to the Bible, the multitude of human languages is a curse. Since the Tower of Babel, there has been division in the world, which led to disagreement, conflicts and war. The language barrier is a sign of human imperfection. To keep man humble, God created scattering. But man did not accept this: for almost 2,000 years, people have tried to undo this curse. If a perfect language, which everyone can understand is invented, perhaps nothing stands in the way of world peace.

Up to the 18th century people searched for a universal language primarily in the past, trying to find the language that Adam spoke, such as Francis van Helmont's ‘Alphabet of Nature’. Since the Enlightenment people searched for that language by looking into the future. A universal language was not meant to arise from an early language form, but could be constructed as an artefact of the human genius. This motivation, for instance, led Charles K. Bliss to make it his life’s work.

Modernism created a stream of rationalized pictogram systems, designed primarily by men with an obsession with the grid. In the digital age, more playful approaches followed, like the expanding symbol language of emojis. Edgar Walthert, the curator of this ‘Annex of Universal Languages’, collected these sources, the result of a deep enthusiasm for visual languages. This personal interest became more public with the release of Logical, a font that contains a rich set of pictograms that can automatically replace words.

The unattainable ideal of the perfect universal language turns out to be primarily a catalyst for even newer forms with which the diversity and richness of the existing patchwork of imperfect languages only grows: that may not be a curse but a blessing.

— Richard Niessen

01 Lingua Igonota by Hildegard von Bingen, sample uses Litterae Ignotae, digitised by WurdBendur.

02 Utopian Alphabet by Thomas More, sample uses XY-Utopian, a part of the Kanji Stroke Order font by Timothy Eyre.

09 Semantography by Charles K. Bliss, sample uses Blissymbolics by Accipiter Media.

11 International SignWriting by Valerie Sutton, sample uses SignWriting by Steven E Slevinski Jr.

17 Emoji by Shigetaka Kurita, sample uses EmojiOne – meanwhile known as JoyPixels.

The backside of the poster is mapping a selection of the most basic symbols to their different meanings. This unveils the fact, that most of these universal symbols are biased towards their creators’ social and historical background.

This is the artwork for the long awaited third solo album of German rapper Dendemann.

The connection to stereoscopic photography specialist Sebastian Denz was made early in the process of album-production. Edgar met Sebastian through teaching at Merz Akademie in Stuttgart and noticed a natural link between Denz’s and Dendemann’s skater background and perfectionistic tendencies. A 3D aesthetic as visual concept for the 3rd record was already a recurring idea.

Sebastian Denz owns a custom-built stereoscopic camera that he uses for high-resolution and large-format portrait pictures. He used this technique in the production of the book Skateboarding.3D. Denz and Dendemann decided on a stripped-down yet iconic shot as the perfect statement for this major release.

Edgar found that the best way to echo the white T-shirt and b&w stereoscopic cover would be black text on white paper. Among several suggested typefaces, Dendemann chose the proposed Logical typeface but without the eye-catching lowercase g. The typeface had just recently been finished by Edgar and released by the foundry Bold Monday.

The DENDEMANN logotype is constructed and not based on a particular typeface.

Back cover and track list

Inner sleves and lyrics