Custom Typeface that Promote Culture

The idea of developing Custom-Fonts came about in mid-2006, after going through several of the publication designs (posters, brochures, prints, signs & billboards, etc..) done within PNG and seeing that we are not culturally represented in some of the publications.  Because culture is an integral part of Papua New Guinean societies, I feel there is greater need to promote it more using provided technology.  This challenged me to research further on some ways to incorporate our cultural themes with technology and share it to the world.

I came up with some fonts for my collections in 2006 but then thought it would be more wiser to include the younger generation (my students at uni) in this project.  So in 2007, this thought paved way for more collective cultural motifs from younger typograpers which resulted in the development of version 1.0 of Kumul Fonts.

Kumul Fonts Version 1.0 is specifically dedicated to raising funds for more innovative projects.  The individual fonts each carry the designer's names and theme.  All of the fonts are branded KF, short for Kumul Fonts.

Culturally, Papua New Guinea is so diverse in terms of it's cultures and languages.  So complex in many ways culturally and geographically.  As of the writing of this post, we have not really developed our own typefaces or even thought of creating something that other people would use particularly in art during this time of technological intervention.  I've realised this and thought it'd be more interesting if we start working on this font collections.  In a way, this creation can open our eyes to look beyond just using someone else's creation and start creating something that other people can use.  This can be a positive direction that will contribute to the design industry of our country.

From a personal direction, Kumul Font development is part of the drive to utilise my abilities in visual arts and computing, making use of the few years of prior trialing.  It put together different knowledge in illustrations, graphic design, multimedia, software programming, project management and leadership.
   

DEVELOPMENT PROCESS:
Before the designs are sketched and illustrated, a subject is selected.  In this case, the subject is the common cultural figure/ identity or traditional design likely to be found in the designer’s home ground. Again, for someone from the Popondetta area in the Oro Province, the designer would most likely select the Tapa design as the subject to base the types around.  We tried to make it more generalised so that each theme captures and promotes the different regions.
From the subject, characters are developed to imitate letters A – Z (upper case) and a – z (lower case), numbers 0 – 9 and common symbols such as ? ! “ : ; ‘ / , . & ) ( _ \ etc…

These characters are custom to the keyboard on the computer and they are the characters which would be brought up when the user type the keys responding to each character.
The illustrations are traced with inks (usually calligraphic pen), the characters scanned and digitized, cleaned, traced and converted into readable font formats (True Type Fonts).  Once all these has been done, the fonts are compiled using one of the programming languages and all contents packaged (put together) ready for distribution.

RECOGNITION:
This initiative (former-Fantasy Fonts) was nominated as the best e-Culture project of the Pacific by panel experts in New Zealand for the World Summit Awards in Britain in 2008.

COMPATIBILITY:
The current version [Kumul Fonts V1.0] is packaged for distribution on windows  computers.  In the future, we would create versions compatible for macintosh.

Once the fonts are installed, they are standardized and will work on any application that enables the use of fonts.  The fonts have been tested on all Office applications (Word, Access, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher), Adobe applications (Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop,ImageReady,) and most other applications that uses texts.  I will still upgrade the version with new features and new font designs would also be added as well in the future.

CREDITS:Digital enhancements, Fonts Conversion and Software programming is done by Me, myself and I (smiles)..

The illustrations of fonts are done by Final year Arts & Design students of the University of PNG in 2007, 2008,2009,2010 and 2011.
PUBLICATIONS:
Sunday Chronicle FEATURE Sunday January 27 2008
National Newspaper WEEKENDER              December, 2007
In Moresby Tonight FEATURED ARTIST December, 2007 8:30 pm
Radio Australia THE LOOP Tuesday October 28 2008 1:30 pm

More Free Tutorials

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HOW TO DOWNLOAD TUTORIALS:   1: Click selected tutorial below 2: New window appears (wait for 5 seconds) 3. Click the SKIP AD button 4. PDF/Zip file will be downloaded

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Supporting Distant Learning through Open College

Recently, I was invited to present my pre-research slides at the "Research and Short Professional Courses Workshop" (held on the 23rd of April 2015) to the senior Staff of the Open College, University of Papua New Guinea about my drive to bridgea the Digital Divide in Papua New Guinea through the development and establishment of a virtual classroom.  At this workshop, I shared some of the references relating to online learning especially using a virtual classroom (Virtual Klasrum [VK], as I called to localize the term).  

sharing mapped locations of project

I also shared some of the pre-research activities and findings I did with my people at the village level.  The concept was new to all of those who were present at the workshop; though it was related to an element of what had already been introduced into the college through their Open Sourced Moodle system which they've developed and trialed out.  The VK/VC concept exploded their imaginations further to the endless possibilities that technology can provide to take learning further to our rural areas.  

The Virtual Klasrum research I carried out started in 2012 after I realized the need to support the people in the village and nearby villages with basic knowledge that are necessary for their development, especially by providing information that is vital to help them sustain their livelihood through small projects they intend to initiate. 

clarifying the vk concept

The idea was to create a knowledge platform that is available 24/ 7 for people in my village or even other remote villages to access whenever they stumbled into situations requiring seeking of knowledge on "How-Tos" to get them moving so that can motivate them to excel in whatever ideas they come up with.  The challenge is to create a system that can be accessed by everyone including those in remote places using available services.  There are countless barriers to achieve the fruition of such ideas however there are also possibilities because the advancement of technology today and in the future will help make them happen.

staff interacting during question time.

Since it was my first presentation regarding the exposure of this pre-researched subject, I prepared it to be pure theoretical so that was made known to the attending staff.  However, I did gave references to evidences of what had already been done as well as carried out so far and what other things or areas that I hoped to advance into.  Above all, the overall intention is to create a living product that can serve the entire nation, connecting our people in the village with those in urban areas including the outer world.  Moreover, this living product can be part of the people and be a system that provides streamed information that are necessary for them so they wouldn't rely much on continuous outside support other than being reliable to help contribute to nation building. 

discussions after the presentation.

(Photographs: courtesy of ArTech, shots by Bingmalu Yalamu)

Interactive Appz to enhance Learning

Since the beginning of April, I've started working on interactive applications and children's games to help me expand my understanding on interactive learning and also support the drive to leverage digital literacy in Papua New Guinea and the Pacific. 

The interactive media industry in the country is not popular especially looking at it from the application development perspective.  You would barely hear people talk about developing applications that target training and development using local contents.  I've tried searching around for similar development teams here, however still haven't been successful.  This had prompted me to come up with one or few applications which I hope would push me to further develop even more engaging applications which can be used to help those wanting to acquire digital knowledge through uniquely fun ways.

These days, the learning process is presented in amazingly innovative and engaging ways throughout the world and interactive learning is increasingly being used throughout most learning platforms and systems.  With that in mind, I thought It'd be good to work along the line of developing rich media content from local knowledge (data) utilizing interactive media.

The first application I created this Month, was a simple yet fun and innovative approach (I think) to learning that embeds traditional concepts to modern experience in an engaging and fun way.  Further to that, I developed again another fun application that uses the concepts of a platform game however has different stages of learning and challenges which the user will go through.  Just recently before this post was written, I worked on another simple game for kids to play with the concept of engaging them to find their way around from one end of a wall to their target through obstacles or enemy lines, as normally referred to in gaming environment.

With all these games and even others yet to be developed, I hoped to use existing experiences and apply standard learning approaches to engage different audiences.  There were few things I've noted that were common in most of our learners and the one that stood out the most was visual messages;

    1) People are used to visual messages and they learn very quickly, their memory can hold visual message longer than written.  But it'd be a standard rule to include what they are good at (visuals) with texts and audio to meet current presentation standards.    

    2) Literacy level is low, and with the influx of people moving in from rural to urban areas, most of them still lack better understanding of reading written content so again, visual message works better, but with the inclusions of audio and texts.

Further to the fact about the power of visual messages, it is obvious that people are deeply rooted to their society or tribes.  Cutting them from their tribe or society is something that might probably take decades to happen.  With this strong bond that people had with their societies, it had given me confidence to develop interactive media content with visual messages that portray the purpose of the learning as well accompanied by custom themes to reflect the backgrounds of the audience; making them be part of this learning process.

Mobile Learning - Use of Android Devices

Since November 2014, I started a new drive as part of my contributions to leverage digital literacy in Papua New Guinea through empowering individuals, organizations and corporate bodies in various Information & Communications Technology (ICT) training.  The focus now is in establishing a clear vision for the future in terms of learning and development and by far, the future will be more technology-oriented.  The world will get smaller and smaller and everything will be at the tip-of-our-fingers.  Learning will be enforced through the use of mobile devices and applications and therefore, we need to educate our people on how to effectively use mobile and android-powered devices to access digital contents or any other available learning resources from anywhere at anytime.  

Information providers, in particular - content developers have looked at easing users' burden to access digital information by bringing the information to the user and not like what used to happen before where users go to search for the information.  Likewise, software developers and hardware manufacturers have already worked on developing platforms that will fit the future.  It is now time for content creators/ developers worldwide to educate the users on how they could use these platforms to help them learn better and even fit into the ever-changing world.

From a general observation I did in various places I visited last year (Hawaii, Australia, Taiwan) including Papua New Guinea, a lot of people these days do not spend time to read the manuals, instead head-on straight to using the services hence resulting in them not utilizing the full potentials of the services they use.  This applies to both the hardware and software that people use.

Content designers/ developers must learn to change the way they present their content by adapting to approaches that is going to be convenient in future and cope with global trends.  There are many things happening these days in regard to technology & learning, and  the barrier I observed was "Knowing How" so I hope more volunteers would rise to help minimize the gap.

Well, I've recently conducted few trainings here in Port Moresby in line with my goal.  Images in this post are some of the recent workshops & trainings I conducted.  Featured here are the training conducted to an android supplier to help them talk the language of the future when selling their android devices and the other was for academics to utilize android-powered devices to deliver learning resources and go paper-less.


There are few other workshops and training I am currently preparing for various schools and corporate bodies in the weeks and Months to come which I will also post to share in this blog.

Tag along if you'd like to hear more of my drive to promote the use of android-powered devices in mobile learning.