title
Elian Script
Artist/Designer
C.C. Elian
Date
2016
type of writing system
Alphabet, Cipher
Based on
Latin script
References
Asian Calligraphy
Elian Script can be described as a calligraphic cipher that evolved from arranging the letters of the Latin alphabet within three 3x3 grids. This gesture resulted in an alphabetic script comprised of lines and dots, which subsequently introduces compositional rules to convert its angular structure into fluid, flexible strokes. This “line jazz”—as the artist refers to it—promotes greater flow and smoother hand-arm movements, thus enabling variations of the same word, echoing the aesthetic qualities in Asian calligraphy. Elian Script has inspired an online micro-community on platforms like Reddit and Tumblr, where users share creations ranging from notes and poetry, to comic strips and artworks written in Elian. The script was shown on two scrolls (numbers 6 and 19) from a series of 35 that transcribe the text “Art of Nao,” written by the artist. The term “nao” itself is a fusion of “now” and “tao,” and it encapsulates a life philosophy that blends Western pragmatism with Eastern universality.
Watch the video about how Elian Script works.
Artwork courtesy of C.C. Elian. 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
