The Bloomsbury Handbook of Global Typography

Paul Luna, Fiona Ross, Aaris Sherin, Sue Walker, Vaibhav Singh

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2026
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350336391
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Graphic Design

This new handbook takes the broadest possible view of typography, defining it as 'design for reading'. It considers all kinds of reading matter and visual communication systems; digital, environmental, printed, and produced by hand.

By offering a rich collection of texts that are genuinely international in authorship and in scope, it seeks to rebalance the Western bias of so many books on the subject. It gives space to new voices and emerging standpoints about the global nature of design, the needs of particular communities of readers, and about the need for inclusivity and historical understanding in design practice and research.

Thirty-seven chapters by forty-three contributors show the interdisciplinary range of research in typography today, exemplifying the relationship between history, theory, and practice that is at the heart of the discipline. They feature over 500 illustrations, mostly in colour, and full bibliographic references.

Topics include:
Typography and sociolinguistics
Frameworks for considering scripts and multilingual documents
Historical and contemporary Arabic-script typographic practice
Designing fonts for marginalized communities in Asia, Africa, and North America
The earliest movable type in China in the tenth century
Understanding Japanese and Korean typography
Approaches to legibility
Western influence on the typography of indigenous writing systems
Political and technological factors that shape typography
Experimental and commercial publishing contexts
The type design industry today
Typography in the environment

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The skeletons and dresses of writing systems
• 2 Putting the world’s writing systems into print
• 3 The origin and development of early Chinese movable type
• 4 Type design as a collaborative process
• 5 A framework for research-informed typeface design
• 6 Analysing the typography of bilingual documents
• 7 Some infuences on legibility
• 8 The work of text in the age of digital information
• 9 The process of shaping text
• 10 Change in the digital type industry
• 11 The straitjacket of modernity
• 12 Hebrew type designs of the 1950s
• 13 The impact of Latinization onArmenian reading matter
• 14 The peculiarities of Cyrillic letterforms
• 15 Cyrillic beyond Russia
• 16 Latin American vernacular lettering
• 17 Sea facing
• 18 Drawing Ireland’s new typographic horizons
• 19 Type-like
• 20 Analysing typographic meaning-making in urban spaces
• 21 Twentieth-century Black American design in context
• 22 The calligraphy, lettering, and typography of Louise E. Jeferson
• 23 Experimental publishing
• 24 The clothes words wear
• 25 Aspects of inclusive text design
• 26 Towards understanding diversity in Arabic typestyles
• 27 Infnite loops
• 28 A Japanese typography primer Unity from diversity
• 29 Hangeul, the script of expansion and harmonization
• 30 From reed to steel
• 31 Reading text in Square Kufic
• 32 Secondary styles inGeorgian typography
• 33 Modifed Arabic scripts
• 34 Democratizing effective typographic expression
• 35 Native American typography
• 36 A typeface design for Africa
• References
• 37 Typography’s duty to language
• References
• Index