Korean Alphabet

After my trip to Korea, many things amazed me from the country. Seoul is a crowded city, but people do things with delicacy and care. For example food, crafts, information, services and so on. In contrast you might feel crushed and pushed in the crowded subway and some places in the city are disorganized. In this post I want to highlight one information design related thing: the Korean alphabet. The Korean language did not have alphabet until fifteenth century when the king Sejong the Great developed a writing system. He was an smart designer because he created a complete one-to-one correspondence between graphemes (symbols) and phonemes (sounds). You can actually say your name to any Korean speaker and he/she can write it in Korean. That is good! I’d say that king Sejong was a good user-centered designer, language rules are easy for people. I am native in Spanish and I’ve complained about English because there is a greater of difference between symbols and sounds compared with Spanish, but Korean is outstanding in this. The concept is that good that Cia-Cia language (an Indonesian dialeact) adopted the korean alphabet!

Korean Signage