Typography has fascinated me since I was ten years old and published my first homemade magazine, which today would be referred to as a zine or a blog. For the past three decades, issues of typographic legibility, readability and aesthetics have crept into everything I do. I am as intrigued by how typographic characters are arranged on a page as I am in the words that these characters form. As paint is to a painter and sound to a composer, words are a writer's toolbox and the alphabet is the pigment, the individual notes, the architecture of words. No other medium has more dramatically defined who we are as human beings than the alphabet, this ability to transcribe and preserve thought, from Laotse to David Foster Wallace. Equally fascinating is the way in which the style of the characters can enhance or detract from a message. What attracted me to work with foreign alphabets is the way the letter forms themselves seem to reflect the character of the people who use them. Think Cyrillic then think Russian and you can see what I mean. From Farsi to Chinese to Punjabi to Cree, letter forms themselves speak as loudly about the cultures using them as the words they express. Then there is the Latin alphabet, the great cultural flatlander but that is worthy of an essay for which this is not the place. Suffice it to say that probably the main reason I devoted myself to foreign language typesetting was to have a legitimate excuse to sit and stare at these various alphabets and get paid for it.