GRANSHAN has been running type design competitions for scripts beyond Latin since 2008. Thirteen editions. Fifteen conferences. Arabic, Armenian, Chinese, Devanagari, Greek, Japanese, Korean, Thai, and many others.
Over those years, something changed. The quality of non-Latin typefaces improved. Dramatically. Designers across the world built better fonts, better systems, better tools. The landscape that existed when GRANSHAN started looks nothing like what’s out there today.
So a new question came up: now that the typefaces exist, what happens with them? Who’s using them well? Who’s making posters, packaging, apps, campaigns, exhibitions that treat these scripts with the same care that went into designing the fonts?
That question became Bloom.
The names tell the story. Base is the foundation: the typeface itself. Bloom is what grows from it: design that uses typography to communicate in the real world.
The two competitions alternate. Bloom runs in 2025/2026. Base returns in 2027. One asks how well the typeface is made. The other asks how well it’s used.
If your project is a font, Base. If your project is design that uses a font, Bloom.
Base is the type design competition.
Bloom is the communication design award.