Located on the first floor are the departments containing the elementary bricks or building blocks of the typographic mason. In other words, the elements of which visual languages exist off. First stop is the Department of Sign, a tribute dedicated to marks, and their meaning assigned to it, left by humans all around the world since prehistoric times. Taken together, such signs form compelling systems or scripts. Like the alphabet, it allows the transfer of ideas and information through mark-making. From codes to signal flags, weather notations to icons, signs are omnipresent in our society. Yet even more so, they are par excellence the essence of graphic languages and therefore intertwined with the practice of typographic masonry. This section commemorates the magic that charges these marks with meaning and aims to preserve the diversity of sign systems.
From increasing circulation in global communities emerges the tendency to universalise sign systems, with as result the declining interest in its cultural diversity. Collecting and preserving evidence of diverse signs and sign-systems is thus a celebration as much as an underlying argument in favour of the variety of graphic languages.
