For my first design and research unit with Didi, I took into account the feedback from the semester presentation and the comments on the Miro board. An important point I took away from my presentation on „The Typographic Representation of the German ‚Scharfen S’/’Eszett'“ is the direction in which my topic will evolve in the next semester and in my upcoming master’s thesis. In the first semester, I delved deeply into the historical development of this letter, the technical challenges, and readability. Towards the end of the semester, I shed light on various design approaches and constructions.
This semester, I plan to delve deeper into the various basic constructions of ß and ẞ and analyze which letter forms are preferred in sans-serif and serif fonts. The availability of fonts that support both lowercase ß and uppercase ẞ is quite limited, making the search for suitable fonts somewhat challenging.
As the focus this semester is on analysis and experiments, I aim to compare the use of ß and ẞ in digital and analog media. It will be particularly interesting to see how ß is treated in headlines set in uppercase, where the double-letter form is often used. I’m very curious to see how much I’ll have to scroll through websites and flip through magazines to find a ẞ.
Furthermore, I plan to conduct a survey on the perception of ß and ẞ among different age groups. Given the controversial basic construction of the uppercase letter, I’m interested in how laypeople would draw this letter or which one they would choose from a selection of different letters.
In the course of my planned experiments and surveys, as well as the insights from the 1st semester, my research question would be as follows:
What challenges and opportunities arise from the integration of the uppercase Eszett in typographic practice and contemporary communication?
