The politics of typographic placemaking: the cases of TilburgsAns and Dubai Font

Abstract

This article explores typographic placemaking by comparing the design and public launch of two city fonts: TilburgsAns (2016) and Dubai Font (2017). Building on recent work on semiotic technology and graphic ideology, the authors examine how these fonts’ visual features and the promotional discourses surrounding their launch are utilized for placemaking, and how this is facilitated and constrained by technology and ideology. The results show that the two projects of typographic placemaking build on a similar repertoire of semiotic technology, but make different use of it. The authors sustain that this difference is explained by the political aims of the two projects, on the one hand, and their economic and organizational scale, on the other. A postcolonial perspective further underlines their geopolitically and historically different preconditions.