Typography Beyond Borders: September 30, 2025
On September 30, the Mason Gross Design community welcomed Sherry Muyuan He, assistant professor of graphic design at the City College of New York, for an inspiring talk about typography across languages and cultures.
Sherry is the author of Typography Beyond Borders, forthcoming from BIS Publishers in November 2025. Her practice explores global writing systems including Arabic, Armenian, Burmese, Chinese, Russian, Ethiopic, Georgian, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, Khmer, Korean, Mongolian (Traditional), Persian, and Thai. With deep curiosity and empathy, Sherry invites designers to move beyond Western typographic traditions and embrace a more inclusive and multicultural design perspective.
During her lecture, Sherry shared her creative journey from playful early projects such as books designed to look like breakfast foods to her research on global typography. Her curiosity grew while teaching multilingual students who spoke Arabic, Armenian, Burmese, Mongolian, Persian, and many other languages. Seeing the lack of design resources for non-Latin scripts, she began collecting and studying them to make their beauty and logic more visible in design education.
Sherry discussed how writing systems like Thai, Arabic, Korean, and Japanese each have unique rules of rhythm, connection, and emphasis that differ greatly from Latin design principles such as italics or kerning. She showed how scripts stretch, link, and shift to convey sound or meaning, explaining that what may appear as mistakes in Western typography are essential design features in other traditions.
Questioning the idea of bi-scriptural design, which often centers English, Sherry encouraged designers to see non-Latin scripts as independent systems with their own visual sophistication and identity. She emphasized that typography is a living, human system that reflects how people communicate and connect across cultures.
About the Book: Typography Beyond Borders
Sherry’s upcoming book Typography Beyond Borders expands on the ideas she presented in her lecture. In today’s global design world, it is increasingly important for designers to create work that connects with diverse audiences. The book is written for designers and students whose native languages do not use the Latin alphabet, as well as educators seeking to build more inclusive classrooms.
By comparing typographic principles across multiple writing systems, Typography Beyond Borders fills an important gap in design education, which has long been dominated by Latin-script models. It offers practical guidance and visual insights for developing culturally sensitive and globally aware design approaches.
Design students will gain confidence in drawing inspiration from their own linguistic and cultural backgrounds, while educators will discover new ways to teach with empathy and inclusion. As Sherry reminded the Mason Gross audience, understanding typography across borders means understanding people and designing with care, respect, and imagination.