The beauty of typography has no borders. While most of us work with the familiar Latin alphabet, international projects usually require quite extensive knowledge about less familiar writing systems from around the world. The aesthetics and structure of such designs can be strongly related to the shape and legibility of the letterforms, so learning about international writing systems will certainly help you create more attractive and engaging Web designs.

Pick any language you like: Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, maybe Nepali? Each is based on a different writing system, which makes it interesting to figure out how they work. Today, we’ll cover five categories of writing systems. This may sound tedious and academic, but it’s not. If you take the time to understand them, you’ll find that they all give us something special. We’ve tried to present at least one special feature of each language from which you can draw inspiration and apply to your own typography work. We’ll cover: East Asian writing systems, Arabic and Indic scripts (Brahmic). If you are interested, we will cover Cyrillic, Hebrew and other writing systems in the next post.

East Asian Writing Systems

Obviously, the Chinese uses Chinese characters (where they are known as hanzi). But Chinese characters are also used in various forms in Japanese (where they are known as kanji) and Korean (hanja). In this section, we will look at four East Asian writing systems: Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese.