Mono Sans Regular. Made to…
“Gain new strength to build a brighter world
untrammell’d by the wiles of endless strife
created by the ravenous kings of gold.”
A quote from Archibald Campbell (A.C.) Jordan, intellectual pioneer of African Studies and Xhosa linguistics, Xhosa novelist and poet. A “brighter world” in this context is a world free of subjugation, in which the people of Africa, are free to determine their own identity, a world free of the plundering of its resources by foreigners who have no legitimate claim to them – what Jordan refers to as “the ravenous kings of gold” – stealers of African peoples’ inheritance.
Dream it.
Amongst the 1st Xhosa literature writers were Samuel Edward Krune (S.E.K) Mqhayi (1875-1945), and Archibald Campbell Mzolisa (A.C.) Jordan (1906-1968, picture on the left) who was responsible for the formal development of the written Xhosa language and its further teaching. Since then, the Xhosa language in South Africa, has developed to be the most evolved and researched indigenous spoken language, with lots of written literature. This development of the language is ongoing, and many are today writing Masters and PhD theses on the Xhosa language. Its teaching is also gaining greater prominence, especially in Eastern and Western Cape schools in South Africa, two provinces where the Xhosa people are the majority. In order to fuel the contribution of Xhosa literature to the global (as well as the Xhosa literacy) through digitization of Xhosa-tailored writing system (Ibhaliwe), Mono Sans Regular font was decided to be created.
Sketch it.
Once the glyphs are finalized, designing the first typeface (according to our analysis, monoline and sans serif) and its first font (Regular) is a matter of using Adobe Illustrator. I created each glyph individually, drawing them on the screen using bezier curves and simple shapes. I then optimized stroke, width and height of each glyph, distributed them within distinct layers and exported each one of those to an SVG file format manually.
Build it.
Then I used FontForge open source software to import each glyph (even space) to an appropriate mapping on the keyboard (for example, Shift+ denotes that either nothing changes since there are no capital letters or an ‘h’-ificated glyph is outputted; characters like @,#,$ etc. encode clicks; simple dot is encoded as three dots with holes). Then spatial boundaries around glyphs are placed individually and pairwise kerning between 66 letters (which is 66^2 = 4.5 thousand pairs) is placed (I did this part automatically). Kerning ensures that letters whose forms are like key and lock are not matched near each other, but rather within each other.
![The final layout for a QWERTY keyboard is the one above. Capitalization either does not affect, or adds an ‘h’ as a ligasion. Special characters, like clicks are available in place of “[{}]\|’”;/<>” and “@#$%^&*()” characters.](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5e2e9d2e474b6e545effcee1/1580188995834-TFNX0PZLS8EWGL2HR3KG/Screenshot%252B2020-01-28%252B00.18.30.jpg)
The final layout for a QWERTY keyboard is the one above. Capitalization either does not affect, or adds an ‘h’ as a ligasion. Special characters, like clicks are available in place of “[{}]\|’”;/<>” and “@#$%^&*()” characters.
Compare it.
Below are the first two lines of South African Hymn (which is also contains Zulu, Sesotho, Afrikaans and English).
Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika
Maluphakanyisw' uphondo lwayo
nkosi sikelel iafrika maluPakajisv upondo lvaio,
Lord bless Africa
May her glory be lifted high
Further technical improvements involve making refinements (such as variable question/excitement marks). More fonts and typefaces shall also be explored upon request of Xhosa-speakers.
Further conceptual and design improvements are also needed to optimize for needs and specifics of the Xhosa community.
And if you are a Xhosa enthusiast, you are very welcome to provide kind advice no matter whether you know Xhosa or are just learning it.