Artist's Comments

To begin with I visited the deaf support at the University, and found that the deaf alphabet had never had any design approaches used on it. Futhermore all the material they were able to give me to aid my research actually used “anti-design” techniques.

Subsequent reasearch encompassed the Dictionary of Sign (, 1992, The Bath Press), which was confusing and the sign poorly presented. Fortunately I had a copy of “: The Language” (, 1996, and Hudson) and here I found an ancient system which inspired me, which was devised for use in bartering.

The typeface I am using is Wexford Bold from the Linotype collection. There are no numbers or letters used throughtout the – apart from the name of the month – in order to encourage people to learn the basic used, and hopefully to interest them in learning the rest. To make interpreting the calendar easier I have given the newcomer to signing a couple of clues by making the weekends red in colour, and the run-on month has as inverted palette.