If legibility is not in the letterform and is produced by familiarity, learning, and a history of what gets repeated and circulated, then legibility is not neutral. It is a trained property.
But trained by what and whom? Built around which reader and which hand?
Typography has rules. They are written down, published, built into design education, embedded in software.We learn to read before we learn what reading is. The letterforms we grew up with stop being shapes and become transparent. The meaning comes through and the form disappears.
But familiarity is not the same as legibility.
As Robin Kinross argues in Modern Typography, typefaces are not intrinsically legible It is the reader’s familiarity with faces that accounts for their legibility. The standard assumes a particular reader, a particular eye, a particular history of learning. The vernacular form assumes a completely different set. A different relationship between the letter and the context it lives in.
I began by looking at letterforms that live outside the standard. Hand-painted signs. Market lettering. Street typography carried by the hand, the material, the width of a brush, and the visual habits of the place it comes from.
These forms are mechanically spaced, not optically spaced. They do not follow the rules. And yet they are read. Every day, fluently, by the people they were made for.
What happens to type when it moves toward the standard? What does that movement reveal about what the standard assumes?
In The Black Experience in Design, the author argues that language in any form has been and continues to be used as a tool of colonisation: of ideas, knowledge, technologies, and behaviours. The typographic standard is not exempt from this. It is one of the forms through which certain ways of seeing and reading were circulated as universal while others were pushed to the edges.
I looked at Kedai-Kedai Merdeka, a typeface designed by Sueh Li of the Kuala Lumpur-based type foundry huruf. It is a creolisation of the Latin alphabet letting Jawi, Tamil, and Chinese morphology inhabit a Latin structure without any one system dominating the others. Characters adopt stroke modulations from non-Latin scripts. The forms carry traces of multiple writing systems simultaneously. Merdeka, in Malay, means independence from colonialism and narrow dogmatism.
What happens when the stroke logic of Devanagari is applied to the structure of Latin?
Devanagari letters hang from a headline. Latin letters sit on a baseline. These are structurally incompatible organisational principles. My natural instinct was to resolve the tension to make the form clean, to produce something that looked more finished.
But when letterforms enter a system that was not built around them, they adapt or they disappear. The curves change. The terminals straighten. The stroke modulation flattens toward uniformity. The form survives by becoming legible according to the standard. It reduces the cultural form into a stereotype. Like the curry house fascias and the pseudo-Indian swash that signals Indian-ness without representing it. The stereotype circulates the form while suppressing the force that produced it. You cannot understand a culture without understanding the force that produced it. So I tested further by amplifying the connecting logic of Devanagari and resisting the urge to simplify the strokes.
When two systems that do not share the same underlying structure are brought into contact, illegibility emerges as evidence. Evidence that the two systems are genuinely different, that they have different tools, different histories, different relationships to what a stroke should do and how a reader should move through a letterform. The complexity is not a design problem to be solved. It is what a cultural form looks like when it has not been reduced for an eye it was never built for.
What you see in the form depends on what you have learned to see. A reader trained inside the Latin system will look for the Latin letter underneath, resolving the form, filling in what seems missing, smoothing what seems irregular. A reader who knows Devanagari might find something else. A familiarity arriving from the same mark, producing a different act of recognition.
Staying with the complexity, refusing to resolve it, is keeping both logics active. Refusing the operation that would make the form clean, circulatable, legible to a reader who was never part of the system that produced it.
Bibliography
Berry. A, Collie. K, Laker. P, Noel. L, Rittner. J, Walters.K (2022) The Black Experience in Design: Identity, Expression & Reflection. New York: Allworth Press
Kinross . R (2004) Modern Typography: An Essay in Critical History. 2nd edn. London: Hyphen Press.
Ong, J. 2021. ‘Huruf explores Malaysia’s visual culture and multilingual vernacular through type’, It’s Nice That, 18 February. Available at: https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/huruf-typography-graphic-design-180221