About


The sign human is used by the Heptapods in the film Arrival for referring to ‘human’. I interpret it as representing the tactile, technical, and sensory beauty of communicating language through visible signs. It conveys in a single motif my work on text, writing systems, and typography in the digital sphere.

As part of my passion for technologies of text, I actively expand support for the world’s writing systems in The Unicode Standard. My contributions enable the basic foundations for the creation, exchange, display, and processing of digital text, from the earliest pictographs to those of the present (= emoji), and all of the alphabets, abugidas, and abjads in between.

My goal is to ensure, one day, that the display, input, and exchange of text in any script — from all parts of the globe and across all temporal frames — is as digitally native as the English text that I typed here, and which you are now reading, wherever you are.

This repository documents my contributions to The Unicode Standard. I hope my work is of some benefit to the linguistic past, present, and future of human.