Some language-independent glyphs for museum shops

[William_J_G Overington]

Many museums and art galleries have online shops these days, and some 
will send items internationally, the customer paying for the items 
online by card.

Yet there is the language barrier.

In the 1970s, before the web, before cards that could be used 
internationally, I purchased some colour slides of paintings from the 
Uffizi in Florence and from the Louvre in Paris by mail order by writing 
letters in Italian and French respectively. I do not know what was the 
quality of my writing in those languages yet I did communicate 
effectively as I received replies in Italian and French respectively and 
I received the colour slides.

So what if one has symbols, precise emoji, language-independent glyphs, 
for the fields needed to make a card payment?

These symbols could be used either stand-alone or together with text in 
the language of the country in which the museum is located.

Some museums have guides and signage in several languages. Yet not in 
every language.

So language-independent glyphs could be a mini-pivot language to assist 
communication through the language barrier for a card purchase 
transaction.

I have produced ten glyph designs. Maybe a few more are needed, maybe 
the colour scheme needs changing, please discuss. Presently I have, for 
each of the ten language-independent glyphs, a colourful version and a 
graceful fallback monochrome version.

There is an experimental colour font available, free to use.

Should such glyphs be encoded in regular Unicode, or as if ligatures of 
a sequence of characters, or as QID emoji?

There is a thread where the font is being applied in examples.

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/144236-some-language-independent-glyphs-for-museum-shops/

William Overington

Thursday 17 June 2021