Show Us Your Type – Beirut

Show us your type is a project about typography and cities. Every now and the people in charge pick a new city and post a call for submissions. There are only few rules, the name of the city should be part of the poster design and the size of the poster is fixed to 396 px x 559 px.
Anyone with internet and some free time – or some unfinished doodles – can submit a piece. One hundred pieces are selected to be showcased on the website.

The title of the project Show Us Your Type implies that every time the project is launched a new set of typographic posters would mirror the idiosyncratic identity of a city and the culture it fosters. The virtual nature of this pseudo-gallery however brings together submissions from all over the world, as shown by the captioned work. Most of the submissions come from people who aren’t residents of the city but people who based their artwork on preconceived notions and internet searches for what that place is about and what landmarks it holds.

What is meant to be reviving showcase of handpicked typographic work ends up as a collection of imagined realities.

The latest exhibition was about Beirut. Several posters had disconnected reversed arabic characters; a result of not knowing the language and not having the Middle Eastern version of the Adobe Creative Suite. Other posters used arabic letters by layering them in a textural and gratuitous approach that fetishizes the oriental look of the Arabic script more than anything else. A lot of the designs submitted from Lebanon however, portrays Beirut as a self-destructing burning city, a response to the recent yet familiar situation.

Below is my submissions, probably a mix of all the above.

Placeholders for Unspecified People

Tom, Dick and Harry — in English
Pierre, Paul ou Jacques — in French
فلان وعلان — in Arabic
Pedro, Paco y Juan — in Spanish

Reading: Metaphors We Live by

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. 2nd ed. University Of Chicago Press, 2003.

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We have seen that metaphor pervades our normal conceptual system. Because so many of the concepts that are important to us are either abstract or not clearly delineated in our experience (the emotions, ideas, time, etc.), we need to get a grasp on them by means of other concepts that we understand in clearer terms. This need leads to metaphorical definition in our conceptual system.

Definitions for a concept are seen as characterizing  the things that are inherent in the concept itself. We, on the other hand, are concerned with how human beings get a handle on the concept – how they understand it and function in terms of it. We are concerned primarily with how people understand their experiences. We view language as providing data that can lead to general principles of understanding. The general principles involve whole systems of concepts rather than individual words or individual concepts. We have found that such principles are often metaphoric in nature and involve understanding one kind of experience in terms of another kind of experience.

Such a concern for how we comprehend experience requires a very different concept of definition from the standard one. The principal issue for such an account of definition is what gets defined and what does the defining.

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