March 15, 2026
Justice gets a glow‑up
Measure of Justice: Covering the Cerîde-I Adliye Covers (2017)
Old Ottoman justice charts get a modern glow‑up—and the comments are on fire
TLDR: Designers reimagined 1920s Ottoman “Journal of Justice” covers into modern motion graphics, including a chart of 1926 prison figures. Commenters are split between celebrating design history and warning against beautifying incarceration data, with side debates over script choices, translation accuracy, and how much context museums must provide.
A century-old “Journal of Justice” just got a 2017 makeover, and the internet has feelings. At Studio‑X Istanbul, curator Ömer Durmaz tapped 10 designers to turn the 1920s covers of the Ottoman-era Cerîde‑i Adliye into motion graphics, including one showing 1926 prison numbers that designer Deniz Cem Önduygu re‑typeset and animated. It’s part history lesson, part visual remix, and all comment-section chaos.
Design fans are swooning over how clean and bold these century-old charts look—“pre‑war infographics slap,” as one put it. But the loudest debate? Does making prison stats look beautiful flatten the pain behind them. Some say the work honors information history; others say it risks “aestheticizing” incarceration. That split fueled spicy threads about context labels, museum notes, and whether every animation should open with a trigger warning.
Then came the type wars. Purists insist the Arabic-script originals are the soul of the piece; modernists defend new Latin fonts as the point of a remix. Meme patrol chimed in with “Ottoman DataViz Cinematic Universe” jokes and “1927 dashboards > your startup KPIs” dunks. Meanwhile, data nerds worried about translation nuance—were categories like “sentence length and type” mapped 1:1? The final vibe: admiration, side-eye, and a flurry of “justice, but make it graphic” memes all battling for top comment. See the original cover here and decide which side you’re on.
Key Points
- •A research exhibition curated by Ömer Durmaz examined information visualization from the Late Ottoman to Early Turkish Republic periods.
- •A subsection, “Measure of Justice,” had designers reinterpret 1920s Cerîde-i Adliye covers as motion graphics.
- •Durmaz supplied materials from his personal collection and organized translations from Ottoman Turkish to modern Turkish plus vector drawings.
- •Ten designers produced typeset reinterpretations and videos, exhibited as prints with comments and in a projection room.
- •Deniz Cem Önduygu reworked the 56th Cerîde-i Adliye cover (1 March 1927) showing Turkish prison convict data as of 1 June 1926.