title
Arrakis
Artist/Designer
Coline Besson
Date
2022
type of writing system
Inscription
Based on
Fremen language
References
Dune (novel by Frank Herbert), Kufic script
Rooted in Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel Dune (1965), Arrakis draws upon the prophecy held by the Fremen, inhabitants of the namesake desert planet. This prophecy speaks of a “Giver of Water” destined to transform their arid world into a verdant paradise. The artwork envisions a scenario where the Fremen have inscribed this prophecy onto a sandstone, foretelling the savior’s arrival. The inscription’s aesthetics interpret what the Fremen language might resemble, drawing inspiration from their society and the challenging conditions of their environment as described in the novel. The geometric structure mirrors the Kufic script—a style of Arabic characterized by angular, rectilinear letterforms and horizontal orientation—mirroring Herbert’s recognition of the influence Islamic culture had on the Dune universe. The creative process favored intuition over rigid grammatical rules; however, subtle repetitions within the script enable the discerning eye to identify recurring words.
This project is the result of the workshop Société spontanée des passés et futurs probables et improbables de la typographie at Lausanne University of Art and Design (ECAL), instructed by Radim Pesko.
Artwork courtesy of Coline Besson. All rights reserved.
abjad
abugida
acrophony
acrostic
alphabet
alphasyllabary
asemic writing
automatic writing
boustrophedon
character
character set
cipher
code
conscript
cryptography
encode
experimental
grapheme
glyph
hieroglyph
hieroglyphics
imaginarium
language
letter
letterform
linguistic
logosyllabary
logographic
logogram
nat scirpt
neography
optophonetic
phoneme
phonetic
pictograph
quasi
re-worlding
script
syllabary
syllable
symbol
speculative
torus
versimilitude
writing system
