Huronia

Ross Mills, with the latest release of Huronia, is cornering the market on Amerindian type design. (The official typeface of the Nunavut government, Pigiarniq, was released by Mills in 2001.) One of the only modulated Inuktitut rend­itions I’ve come across, Huronia is a pleasure up close and a graceful plodder for setting long copy.

For this write-up, I’ve had to educate myself on the origin and use of Inuktitut. A recent system, Inuktitut was modified from the Cree and Ojibwe syllabic systems, which themselves only came into existence around 1840 by the missionary James Evans. The aboriginal North-American languages were almost always exclusively oral, and currently Inuktitut uses Latin (Canada) and Cyrillic (Siberia) interchangeably with Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics for their written communications.

Across the writing systems, the Huronia drawings are a beautiful post-individual-tool rendering: somewhere between brush strokes (the Inuktitut italics!) and paper cut-outs (the Latin Capitals!) with their mix of smoothly wavering curves and scissor-turning cor­ners. The sometimes cockeyed angles and decisions of the individual glyphs, when viewed at a macro scale, ex­plain themselves as they blend seamlessly in text — a warmer Dwiggins, not to overuse the reference.

When I first spotted Huronia, only Latin and Inuktitut were supported. Upon a revisit for penning this, I saw that Cherokee, additional Native American sup­port, and Greek are en route, thus soon covering all of North America and a small peninsula in the Mediterranean.

Ksenya Samarskaya is a creative practitioner working between the Iberian and North American coasts. Samarskaya & Partners is a creative practice with a collaboration model at heart, featuring a rotating team of kick-ass designers, developers, copywriters, and artists, who come together to craft logotypes, brand strategies, research, writing, and multilingual type design.