Please Watch Your Tone is a design research project which critiques the phenomenon of Asian mimicry typefaces. It questions the role that visual communicators play in outputting responsible and ethical visual culture into the world. The body of work encompasses a typeface, Jyut Sans, a website and a publication. Jyut Sans is the vehicle through which this project graphically conveys the tonal richness of Cantonese. Its structural components reflect the idiosyncrasies of the language.
Historic and current representations of East Asian identities, particularly Chinese identities, have not always been ethically portrayed in the media of Western societies. Some depictions of Chinese identities have ranged from being tokenistic at best and outright racist at worst. This project, Please Watch Your Tone, questions these representations in visual communication design. It particularly challenges the ethicality of Asian mimicry typefaces, and the role of visual communicators in producing these superficial depictions of language and culture. Mimicry typefaces exist to imitate the aesthetic qualities of East Asian script without any lexical or tonal nuance.
This project presents an alternative to mimicry typefaces to critique this phenomenon in the visual communication design world. Please Watch Your Tone presents the typeface Jyut Sans as the vehicle through which this project diagrammatically portrays spoken tonality in Cantonese. On one hand, structural elements of the typeface communicate the idiosyncrasies of spoken Cantonese. On the other hand, the typeface works as a diagrammatic system that graphically visualises the tonal movements in Cantonese speech.
