Jaap Knevel

Department: Man and Communication
Website: www.jaap.me

Hello World

“Variation is disturbing to me,” says Jaap, “I prefer straightforward simplicity.” Being an autistic person, he has an unstoppable urge to create order. Determined to standardise the world around him, he has designed a universal writing system that works for any language: a unique set of new characters that capture the meaning of words. He asked various people from different cultures to draw their interpretation of a word, for example ‘hello’. Self-developed software rendered the average of those drawings, which he straightened up typographically. The result is a visual alphabet that aims to control the chaos of multilingualism.