Varia

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A collection of other creations of mine, including my curiously strong opinions on the proper design of the novel German letter ẞ, my proposed method of writing the German language in Tolkien’s elvish letters (Deutscher Tengwar Modus), and my dabblings in graphic design.

Capital eszett

ẞ, the capital version of the iconic German letter eszett (ß), was added to Unicode in 2008 and officially adopted into German orthography in 2017. Many typefaces were hastily retrofitted with this glyph, often by type designers who had never used the letter themselves, and lacked best-practice examples to draw from... leading to many unfortunate designs, ranging from the awkward to the downright unusable. This lead me to write up a detailed guide on How to Draw a Proper Capital Eszett, as a public service. You’re welcome. 🤓

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German Tengwar mode

Like countless others, I fell in love with the swooshy elven calligraphy in JRR Tolkien’s fantasy world as a teenager. Since Tolkien didn’t use these Tengwar only for various elven languages, but also for English, I started thinking about how I would adapt them for my native German. I wasn’t the first to pursue this idea, but while previous proposals fixated on a linguistic-phonetic view of German, mine put user-friendliness first and foremost, much as Tolkien had done with English. Thus, my German Tengwar Mode was born.

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Graphic design

Although I’ve always taken a great interest in the graphic arts, I’ve never pursued them to any level of professionalism. Nevertheless, here are a few tidbits of my design work.

API: While I was working at the University of Amsterdam’s Anton Pannekoek Institute, I got to design its logo. It represents an astronomical observatory at first glance, whereas closer inspection reveals it is constructed from the letters API.
LCS: I was one of the participants in the group effort to come up with a flag for the Language Creation Society (LCS), and happened to be the one who drew the final design that was then officially adopted by the LCS. The ziggurat represents the tower of Babel, which not only stands for language diversity, but also traditionally serves as a translation text for conlangs. The spiral ramp show that the tower is still under construction, much as a conlang is never really finished.
I’ve recently started on reworking and modernizing the design:

(The slogan Bespoke Conlangs was proposed by Sai.)
The Clefmore: Michael Stith commissioned me to develop the sword glyph hidden in my Cormorant typeface into a logo that would incorporate the treble clef. It was originally intended for an album cover. I rather like how it came out!
Coronation: During my years in the Academic Choir of Zürich, I designed a number of concert posters. The last program in which I was involved was centered around Mozart’s Coronation Mass, hence the crown cork visuals.

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