In the 1960s, German teacher Johanna Zinke investigated air turbulences by asking people to exhale cigarette smoke as they vocalized various syllables. She captured the patterns of smoke generated during the vocalization of the syllables and found that the air turbulences formed were reproducible. Approximately a third of the 293 writing systems of mankind are syllabic scripts—where each character or symbol represents a single syllable. In this project by Ilka Helmig and Johannes Bergerhausen, two approaches explore syllables and syllabic systems: Sound Clouds is a series of five ink drawings visualizing the syllables BA, BE, BI, BO, and BU, inspired by Zinke’s research. Syllabaries, an infographic from the Missing Scripts initiative, catalogs all known syllabic writing systems, past and present, each represented by a typographic reference glyph—typically the character KA.

Type design credits: Johannes Bergerhausen, Arthur Francietta, Jérôme Knebusch, and Morgane Pierson, 2018–2022.