Last fall I made a little palm-sized pamphlet that I called The Holy Book of Admet. I created a character and united a small audience around a shared dislike for him. I made up a little story to go with him and his journey and started drawing pictures to help tell that story, thinking I might do something funny with it.
At the same time, I was working on a numeral / phonetic alphabet system, inspired by the Korean alphabet and the Chinese method of counting to 10 on a single hand. As I started thinking about getting Admet’s story printed, it seemed like a good opportunity to give the system a real-life trial, so I finalized the glyphs, digitized them, and made them into a font. Then I transcribed the words from regular written English1 into “numarunes” (number + rune, very clever, I’m well aware) — so the numarunes are still in English, they’re just using a different alphabet, a different letter or character (numarune, I guess), for each sound.
After that I had it printed at a local Minuteman press.
If you’re interested in seeing what my creative / productive process looked like, or if you’d like to download the book or the font for yourself (free, obviously), I’ve just put the project up on Behance — you can find the pdf and otf files under “Downloadable Assets.” (And don’t worry, you don’t have to sign in to Behance or anything.)
Fortunately, other people are as strange as me. My friend angry turnip2 made a web app where you can use your keyboard to type in numarunes — try it out and screenshot it and send me your results! And other friends have collaboratively crafted real physical three dimensional Admet propaganda ephemera!
Thanks to everyone who’s participated in Admet so far, and thanks to you for reading! May your curiosity ever and always be rewarded.
How else would a holy book be made?
Remember that a written language, at least in the case of English, is the visual representation of sounds, which are organized into words (cognitively and acoustically), which in turn are connected to ideas and meaning.
No, not that angry turnip, a different angry turnip