[Design] Gallifreyan_Introduction

Ever since I started watching Doctor Who at the age of 14, I was in love with the mysterious race of time travelers. In their robes and ornaments, they were noble, above all others. And, of course, the fact that the Doctor was one of these ‘time lords’ definitely made me like them even more. As much as I enjoyed their presence, along with Rassilon’s metal gauntlet and their ridiculous fashion, their unique inscriptions, including the one on the Tardis intrigued me a lot. To become one of them, I started to search for ways to translate it. Unfortunately, it didn’t take me long to find out that actually, the ‘Gallifreyan’ writings on the show are a bunch of random circles. But then, that was when disappointed Miwnoo stumbled against a fan-made script: ‘Sherman’s Gallifreyan(I’ll refer to it as merely ‘Gallifreyan’ from now on.)

According to the website “https://shermansplanet.com/gallifreyan/”, the creator of this writing system isn’t affiliated with the BBC: in other words, all this was unofficial. But, instead of being disappointed, I tried to figure out a way to write in these. After all, these did look cool! Circles engulfing other circles, lines strutting out from one another: this was the perfect writing system for the noble .time travelers.

To give a brief explanation of how Gallifreyan works, one needs to acknowledge that this isn’t a language: it’s a script, designed to ‘translate’ the English Alphabet into a collection of circles and lines and still be understood. In Gallifreyan, one word is represented as a circle. Within this outermost circle, the circles that represent consonants, as you can see on the left, are placed: they are distinguished from one another by the use of lines and the number of dots. The vowels, which are written with smaller circles ‘interact’ with the middle-sized ones of the consonants as you can see on the right. Lines can stretch out and connect with one another.

For example, this is a demo I created using Illustrator: I wrote ‘Hello’ in Gallifreyan. As you can see, the circles representing the vowels are smaller than those of consonants. Now, using the fancy tools in Illustrators, one can make dull phrases like ‘hello’ look so cool and mysterious.

Here, I used the ‘Width Tool’ to vary the width of the lines to make the script look more dynamic, then used the ‘Clipping Mask’ to add an image of a galaxy, giving the writing an ethereal atmosphere. If I want to, I can go crazy and experiment with new styles. With more than a hundred of these ‘drawings,’ I’ve mainly experimented with the shape of the circles — which were soon unable to be called as ‘circles’ — by morphing and twisting the dimensions of each component. What disappointed me at first, the lack of rules, promptly helped me express my creativity and the daringness to new methods.