I made a tiny pixelated Written Mayan font!
A few months ago I partook in the class "Alternate Typographic Histories" at @sfpc_nyc , led by Levi Hammett ( @exact.location ) and Hind Al Saad ( @hindgalsaad ). For our final projects, all of us contributed a few pages to a zine, contributing a subject or typography project of our choosing. I want to make more of a habit to post things I work on on here, and this was a nice small project to kickstart that.
A lot of friends know that I obsess over indigenous languages, and for the last few years i've been a contributor towards a group effort to contribute Mayan and all >1,300 of its characters to Unicode. The project stalled for the most part during covid but picked back up this year, so the language has been fresh on my mind and this was a nice opportunity to dust off some of my knowledge outside of our normal font development work.
I sort of absentmindedly forgot to submit edits for the zine so the ig handle and domain on there aren't accurate (i was going to change my handle right around then, but oh well), but if you want to follow the possible future development of the project you can do so at mayan.onmy.computer or via the substack URL in the zine (which I think you can find at SFPC's physical location, i'm not sure)
Special thanks to Carlos Pallan, the research lead on our Unicode project, for imbuing me with Mayan wisdom and helping me better understand the language - and to all of my really cool classmates for the inspiration
#mayan #typography #mayanglyphs #fonts
ilford 400
if i took a photo of you in november, it got exposed along with 11 other people on the last frame because i didn't realize it was a 24 exposure roll.
