"Written Europe" is a Comenius School Partnership
which highlights the rich European history and its
cultural traditions through the study of graphics
in public spaces in several European cities. Four
European graphic design schools were involved in
this project which lasted 3 years. While exchanging
experiences, many contacts with diff erent institutions
have been established throughout Europe and
a frequently visited multilingual website has been
created.
Amsterdam, Madrid, Prague and Riga are the four cities
involved in the project. Each year, a group of pupils of
the respective graphic design schools studied a specifi c
theme. The fi rst theme which has been emphasised was
"written cities". What do cities say to us? Informative
graphics, identity advertising, poetic utterances were
detected and analysed. The following theme was written
things and persons. For this action the pupils studied
the mobile elements in the cities, small and big objects
such as brands, trademarks, cars, public transport, or
furniture. Also the animals in cities were observed, their
names, marks, etc. And the same was done for people,
their names, tattoos, marks on clothes and on bodies.
The fi nal phase of the project local, global and common
graphics was a synthesis of the work carried out during the
two previous years in the four cities. The local identities
were compared to the global identity.
The project allowed to identify every participating city and
to determine its own local identity. Infl uences between
diff erent cities were tracked and through comparative
studies and analysis of the compiled information, the
pupils were able to look for a European graphic identity.
They examined the trend towards a global non-identity
and searched for the common way we are writing Europe.
The European dimension for both school staff and students
was present at all stages of the project. This very original
and well elaborated project substantially increased
the awareness of globalisation and cultural integration
amongst European young people. Materials and pupil and
teacher experiences are available to a large public via an
attractive website. The project has also been presented at
conferences, various museums, associations and institutions.
Several exhibitions have been organised.