Every two years, the GRANSHAN Type Design Competition honours outstanding typefaces in ten scripts: Arabic, Armenian, Chinese, Cyrillic, Georgian, Greek, Hebrew, South Asian, Korean und South East Asian. The GRANSHAN Foundation announced the winners at the »Common Characters: GRANSHAN Talks & Ceremony« event in Reading in June. Now the team around GRANSHAN President Boris Kochan and Chairwoman Veronika Burian had travelled to Georgia and Armenia to personally hand over the diplomas and the coveted megaphones with the inscription »Give Voice To Type«.
The first event took place on 3 September at the Design Institute in Georgia’s capital Tbilisi. In addition to honouring the Georgian award winners, there were introductory words, for example by Nino Jishkariani, a leading personality in Georgian type design and chair of the Georgian SCRIPT GROUP of the GRANSHAN competition. Boris Kochan spoke about the importance of writing as an identification and political tool and Veronika Burian presented GRANSHAN and the winners.
From Tbilisi, the journey continued to Yerevan, where the Armenian prizewinners were presented with their awards at the Academy of Fine Arts on 7 September. Before the award presentation, the main focus was on GRANSHAN founder Edik Ghabuzyan. Former ATyPI Chairman John D. Berry spoke about him, as did Angela Poghosova, Script Chair of the Armenian Script Group, who told the story of Edik and GRANSHAN. Edik Ghabuzyan was then presented with the GRANSHAN Lifetime Honour Medal by President Boris Kochan.
A highlight at both events was the exhibition of the winning works of the 13th GRANSHAN Type Design Competition. Two posters were displayed for each winning work: a free work designed with the winning typeface and a structured presentation of the special features of the respective typeface.
