A Little Gobbledy-Gook For This Week of Gobble Gobble

For more than a decade, the annual calendar by the Serbian publishing company Publikum has become somewhat of a global icon for how design can truly do good. George Mill and Nada Ray launched the project in the hopes of bringing support, creativity and attention to the country’s war-torn arts community. Since 1993, they’ve recruited plenty of Serbian designers, karlssonwilker, Christo, David Byrne, Barbara Kruger, Mirko Ilic, and now Paula Scher.

For the 2007 calendar, Scher transformed the Cyrillic alphabet into a glorious and utterly meaningless cacophony of shapes, hence the name Gobbledy-Gook:

We took this rare opportunity of accidental illiteracy to explore a foreign typeface and language (Serbian) formalistically and compare and contrast it to the one we understand (English). What follows are some typographic explorations in form and meaning.

This piece in STEP by Terry Stone has lots more information about the calendar’s history and great spreads from this year’s piece.

A launch party at the ADC on November 28 is from 6 to 9pm, RSVP to resATadcglobal.org.

Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.