12/27/2022 0 Comments Portland graphic design studio![]() ![]() The Cherokee language consisted of one set of symbols, all uppercase. In addition to being the latest, Jamra’s font is the most inclusive, the first commercially available Cherokee font, and the first to include italics and lower- and uppercases. The tribe’s writing system has been in continuous use since the 1820s, and adapted for every major form of print technology, starting with the printing press in the late 19th century to several models of typewriters in the early 20th century, word processing in the 1980s and computer fonts in the 21st century. Jamra’s work fits into a much larger picture of Cherokee culture, Boney said. There are Cherokee interfaces for Microsoft Windows and Google, as well. Today, Jamra’s efforts are a part of the Cherokee’s push to make the language available across digital applications, including Apple devices and Android phones. He created a cleaner set of characters in a variety of weights that ranged from light to bold. “Mark created a font that represented those symbols accurately and authentically.” “Before Mark, there were a handful of fonts that existed, but many of the glyphs weren’t accurate or were completely wrong,” he said. That’s in part because efforts to adapt Sequoyah’s symbols for digital use have been less than satisfactory, said Boney. ![]() Previous efforts to update the writing system have been spotty, said Roy Boney Jr., a Cherokee who manages the language program of the Cherokee Nation Education Services Group in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, where the tribe is based.Īs many as 10,000 people speak Cherokee, Boney said. Over time, as Cherokee Indians folded Anglo culture into their own, English replaced Cherokee as their primary language, both spoken and written. Sequoyah’s system was widely used among the Cherokee and was the principal tool for recording recipes, writing letters and preserving folklore for more than a century. Jamra’s work modernizes a writing system developed by the Cherokee silversmith Sequoyah in 1820. This one, he hopes, helps restore cultural identity among people who lost it in their assimilation into Anglo-American society. This is not just another pretty typeface, one among dozens that Jamra has designed in a career of more than 30 years. Jamra’s cathedral is Phoreus Cherokee, a typeface family that he began circulating over the past year. “I wanted something that would outlast me.” “People are always trying to build their cathedral, that thing that outlives them,” Jamra said. But nothing matches the satisfaction of knowing he’s helped preserve a culture and advance a language, he said. Classically trained and considered a master by his peers, he has received national and international awards for his lettering and typefaces. Jamra, 59, is celebrated in the world of type and design as an innovator. ![]()
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