And on to Cambodia

In my dissertation I have made the point that exhibition designers can understand context more thoroughly by taking a social semiotics approach. This is particularly important for typographic language, because it is within the field of social semiotics that typography is finally gaining some recognition as a multimodal signifying practice – that is, typographic language makes meaning in more than one way, and its meaning is contingent upon the cultural context in which it's operating. *


A Cambodian version of The Rescuers, which, like the Bosnian exhibition, is also bilingual, has its own challenges, but by approaching it from a social semiotic perspective, I believe it gives me a clearer picture of what is needed in the design. Firstly, the Khmer language in its digital form is very complex, and as the Unicode has only recently been developed, there's still a few problems associated with it. A few months back I tackled the issue of intsalling the Khmer unicode and a selection of typefaces, which means that now he design time is upon us I'm not trying to work all of that out. However, there are several issues still. Not all of the typefaces have been designed based on the unicode, so if you use them, they end up looking like this:

If you compare this typeface with the one below it, you can see that some of the characters are converted to another symbol by default. Many of the more decorative Khmer typefaces do this, making the choice of typefaces for use in the exhibition design quite limited.

I have designed the first panel and asked the translator to check the layout also. Khmer is a very difficult language to typeset because of all the sub and superscript consonants and vowels. Also, although I have been to Cambodia many time and also lived there for a while, it's impossible for me to understand what the connotations of this typeface might be visually. For these reasons, it's important that a native speaker also looks at the first round of typesetting and alerts me to anything that might be a mistake on either the linguistic of cultural level of communication.

Although this design is very challenging, I would say that understanding the cultural context is vital to its success, as is working with a team of people who you can openly communicate with.


Here is the panel layout, less any suggestions that might come from the translator.

It's very different from the Bosnian exhibition. the first thing is that the black is gone. This was requested by the curator who felt that it's a bit of a heavy colour for the subject matter. Also, as we have a bit more freedom with the size of the panels this time (they are printed, light-weight board), it was possible to bring the image right to the edge. The right hand side is actually a crop of the photograph, which I will do for all of the images. I like it because it give a continuity to the whole panel, and brings out more. The typeface in English has been changed to Carto Gothic pro (this was used for headings in Bosnia) - as we don't need to confine the English-language typesetting to a typeface that supports Bosnia, I had more freedom to choose a simpler, sans serif typeface. This was important because the Khmer is very decorative, no matter which typeface you set it in. Below are some examples of some Khmer typefaces - it's easy to see, even in a language that's not your own, how typefaces convey meaning visually as well as linguistically. The real trick is knowing what they are conveying if the culture and language are not your own.

* For more information, I suggest Theo Van Leeuwen's Introduction to Social Semiotics (2005), Van Leeuwen (2006) "Towards a Semiotics of Typography" Information Design Journal + Document Design 14 (2), 139-155, Stuart Hall's Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (1997).