Oniresi is a display typeface designed during the Type@Cooper's workshop Principles of Typeface Design: Display Type, in the Fall of 2020, with Juan Villanueva to suit and celebrate the specificities of the Yoruba (Èdé Yorùbá) language.
Doing the research on the structural part of the language, I found a project called Pan-Nigerian that was idealised in the 80's by professor Dr. Victor Manfredi (African Studies Center of Boston University) and developed with the help a famous german type designer. Back then, the idea was to create one unified character map for typewriters and typesetting that contemplated the most common languages in Nigeria, in addition to Yoruba, English, Igbo and Hausa.
My goal is to apply a critical view by approaching the original drawings with another mindset and listening to current communication needs of the Yoruba users in the digital era. In Unicode, the Yoruba diacritics are inconsistent, often illegible and not easily made the basis of text search, which is the foundation for the information economy that the world has adopted.
This project is not a revival but an attempt to take another path.
Leaving behind what we no longer want to perpetuate.
I would like to thank those who helped me so far in this project and its path:
Victor Manfredi, Moussa Kone, Rodrigo Lopes, Marina Mota, Cyla Costa, Andrea Kulpas, Fabricia Ribeiro, Ana Laydner, Luisa Baeta, Aline Kaori, Lygia Pires, Flávia Zim, Zrinka Buljubašić, Zofia Janina Borysiewicz, Ana Michel, Fernanda Meireles, Daniel Rana, Lucas Blat, Filipe Negrão, Guilherme Menga, Jackson Alves, Johann Freitas, Gen Ramires, Stephen Nixon, Eduilson Coan, Leonardo Buggy, Henrique Beier, Álvaro Franca, Fernando Mello, Claudio Reston, Mateus Moretto, Ramon Cavalcante, Breno Furtado e Rômulo Silva.