Each city, and especially age-old towns like Lisbon, has its own characteristic 'script'. Its streets and alleys are like the lines of a hand, like a fingerprint. And at the same time these lines are the lines along which the city is 'written'. Each quarter, each neighborhood has its own handwriting, its own visual style in which it is expressed and expresses itself. Bairo Alto has a different script than Baixa. From old calligraphy to today's graffiti, from azuleija's to sprayed tags, small images and words characterize each neighborhood, each block, each street.

We propose to walk these streets to read and study the scripts we find on the way. To sample and collect them, and analyze them in order to see what we can say about their messages.

Ideally, this would give us the raw material for defining the visual identity of (small) parts of the town, of streets and blocks or sub-divisions of quarters. We would have, so to speak, the bytes in which we could write a new script for the localities we have been studying.
That's what we'll do: make new tags for the city, based on the old ones, on the existing visual signs we have found. Whether as a means of identifying parts of the city on street signage, or as identification along a locality's confines, or as a markers on street corners or on houses, or just as a mysterious script for passers-by to decipher… What we are going to see is if we can find an argued visual language based on, not merely abstract theories of information design, but on our own living experience of a city's expressions.