Prof. Johannes Bergerhausen

Born 1965 in Bonn, Germany, Profesor Johannes Bergerhausen studied Visual Communication at the University of Applied Sciences in Düsseldorf. From 1993 to 2000, he lived and worked in Paris. First he collaborated with the Founders of Grapus, Gérard Paris-Clavel and Pierre Bernard, then he founded his own office. In 1998 he was awarded a grant from the French Centre National des Arts Plastiques for a typographic research project on the ASCII Code. He returned to Germany in 2000 and, since 2002, is Professor of Typography at the University of Applied Sciences in Mainz. Lectures in Amiens, Beirut, Berlin, Frankfurt, London, Paris, Prague, Rotterdam, San Francisco, Weimar. Since 2004, he is working on the decodeunicode.org project, which went online in April 2005. The project is supported by the Germany Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

Decode Unicode –- The Open Science Database

Closely following the DNA, the ASCII-Code ranks amoung the most successful codes on this planet. Now, Unicode is taking its place.With this encoding system, millions of typographic laypersons have access to a huge character repertoire right on their keyboard: Latin, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, Chinese, etc. – every script, more than 90,000 characters, are represented in Unicode. Now is the right time to gather and explain the history, the various meanings and correct typographic use of each Unicode character. Who “invented” the full stop? When did the Infinity sign come into being? What’s an Ogonek?

The advent of Unicode and OpenType is a technical revolution. Even more so, however, it marks a cultural one. In an 18-month project in the department of Design at the University of Applied Sciences in Mainz, Germany, we are collecting images, texts and information about each and every Unicode character. In April 2005, the project went online and since has more than 700 visitors a day.

In his lecture, Prof. Bergerhausen will give a short introduction to code-history and will present the project.