Meitheal Type Design
This project began from an interest in the National Folklore Collection of Ireland, one of the largest folklore collections in the world gathered between 1935 and 1970, consisting of photographs, written accounts and recordings of folklore, local knowledge, traditions, trades & crafts. Given that so much of the material is rooted in language, I wanted to convey a unique aspect of the archive within a typeface. After a period of experimentation, I focused on the ‘Meitheal’ community transcription process of the archive, where anyone can log on to the digital archive and help transcribe the scans of collection books to increase accessibility of the material.
The outcome is Meitheal, a typeface named after this process and a word originating in agriculture, in rural Ireland referring to community and specifically, a group coming and working together to complete a job. The typeface attempts to imbue elements of traditional Irish script into a serif typeface, drawing out the texture of written forms through angles and varying brackets of letterforms. One particularly influential source was the Piaras Grás Manuscript available via the Irish Scripts on Screen website
All photos used are available on the digitalised version of the archive via Dúchas.ie
