36 Days of Type, is a yearly design challenge with the purpose of tasking designers to design the letters of the alphabet and numbers 0-9 in a nicely designed way unique to the designer. While at Tangerine, I ran a team challenge to create our own twist on the 36 Days of Type. Which was focusing on BSL (British Sign Language) fingerspelling alphabet.

I’m not deaf or hard of hearing, but I grew up learning how to do basic sign language and fingerspelling due to the community I lived in. And as I have gotten older, it has become an extremely useful language especially not being hard of hearing I am able to act as an intermittent translator for situations where there is not one.

But after doing so much work with subtitling work, and preaching about accessibility I realised that this industry still isnt accessible to those who are hard of hearing and rely on BSL. So I challenged my team to bring new life to 36 Days of Type and do it via finger spelling. This did mean before the team could start designing, I had to teach them fingerspelling and essential signing they could use in their day to day lives.

The selection below features some of my favourites unique ones that aere’t 3D including 2D frame animation (A), digital paintins (E, R, 3) and traditional painting using watercolour (L) and oil paints (X).