The Netherlands is a much smaller country than Thailand and we are 16 million compared to 66 million inhabitants. Our big neighbours are Germany and England. The Dutch have their own identity, expressed, over the past decades, in ‘Dutch Design’. Type design has played a prominent role in this movement. Over the past two decades, Dutch Design has slowly merged into European design and even into Global design. We have not lost our identity, it has been absorbed by many designers from other countries. We use the Latin alphabet, which we share with the Germans, the British, the Americans and many others.
If, as a nation, you have your own script, like the Thai script, it is relatively easy to express your own identity. Does this work with globalization? Increasingly the Latin alphabet is being combined with other scripts, not always designed by users of the Latin script. More and more users of other scripts design Latin letterforms, to be combined with their own script. For this reason it is interesting to know what all scripts in the world have in common, what the connections are between different cultures, for example between the Dutch and the Thai peoples.

This lecture is presented by Adobe.