29.Jun.2008 The story of Palatino Arabic

I joined Linotype in February 2005 as an intern working on Arabic fonts. As many people know, Prof. Hermann Zapf has a great working relationship with Linotype and he comes to the office quite often. Shortly after I joined, Bruno Steinert introduced me to him and told him about my work there. The following May, we had our first meeting and I presented my work done so far and we looked at prints of his Al-Ahram typeface which he had designed for the Al-Ahram newspaper in Cairo in the fifties. Bruno suggested that we revive the typeface and we scheduled that we start work in October as I was quite busy at the time.

And so come October, I scanned the early prints and set about redrawing the characters. Our first sessions where really interesting!! I had never worked together on a project with someone of his caliber. We would work all day and stop only for lunch. Those sessions where the equivalent of an extra MA degree! It was so interesting to observe how he looked at outlines, the way he looks at characters, and just how sharp his eyes are.

Once, we were checking to see if the thicks and thins were even across the entire character set so we measured the stroke thickness to make sure. At some point we came across a glyph and he immediately said the thin is too thick and we measured it and it was only 4 units thicker! That’s 4 out of a 1000 units per em, an extremely fine detail.

When looking at the original design we noticed that there were several features that came about due to technical limitations of hot metal and we decided to re-address that. The design took on new life and within just a few versions it became something completely different. We had decided that it would be a companion to Palatino nova (the Platinum version of Palatino), and there was very little of the original design left in it. And so Palatino Arabic was born.

The design took quite a while to complete. By January 2006 the individual glyphs were looking good but the word shapes were just not working out. For the next months the main issue to solve was the character joins and the relative proportions. As I had a lot of other responsibilities at Linotype, especially within marketing, work on Palatino Arabic was not as fast as we had originally thought. Still, since there were time lapses in between, every time I opened the files, I saw the design with new eyes. This is actually very efficient and was the same case with all my other typefaces.

Palatino Arabic was one of the most difficult projects that I ever worked on. This is mainly because there are rarely any straight lines to be seen. This makes the outlines more difficult to draw, and the character joins more tricky. Point placement was an issue, since we needed to make sure that all characters appear as if part of the same stroke irrespective of the combination. This is quite hard to get to and requires a lot of testing but we eventually got there.

At some point it became obvious that we needed a lot of ligatures. Usually, I’m not a ligature fan but Palatino Arabic needed to have them and so I started expanding on the existing design. By then, I was quite usd to the style that we draw the glyphs in so I could draw more characters on my own and they would still maintain the same look and feel as the ones that I worked on with Pro. Zapf. I did the mistake of jumping in too quickly with the ligatures and I started designing them when the main characters were not finished yet. I had to redraw everything once the main glyphs were actually finished.

The design of Palatino Arabic is relatively classical. It’s mainly based on Naskh but with a little bit of Thuluth in it. We moved away from tradition and made all the counters quite open even for characters that are traditionally “blind” as in having no counter at all. These characters are usually closed off because the pen is too thick for their size but if you slightly expand their size then you can have a more open, and more legible, result.To make sure that we got it right, we consulted with a calligrapher towards the end of the project. The feedback came back very positive and there were very minor things to fix.

And so towards the end of 2007 the design was finalized and we started production. The TDC award came as the cherry on top of a very delicious cake. It was such a great learning experience and I am so lucky that I actually got to sit side by side with a legend. The filming for the Helvetica movie at Linotype coincided with one of our sessions and they filmed us working together in my office. Gary included it in the extras on the DVD and gave permission for me to post it here. The interview with Prof. Zapf took place in the outdoor part of our cafeteria and hence all the greenery and the water sounds.

Palatino Arabic was always meant to be a book face though I know find it to work well in large titles. Its relationship to its Latin is more ideological than visual. They do have the same weight and optical size but Palatino Arabic is matching Palatino nova in its function as a text face. When designing it, the main concern was how to make a good text face that is legible and still has the trademark Zapf touch. It did not follow the design of the Latin in the actual details and it never meant to. Still, the two work well together and they follow the same philosophy in design.

This approach to harmonizing Arabic and Latin is quite different from the one seen in Frutiger Arabic or in Koufiya. Koufiya is meant for bilingual publications and Frutiger Arabic is originally a signage face and so it would sit in proximity to its Latin. Palatino Arabic is a book face and there’s a very unlikely chance that you would have the two on the same page. I found that it is quite interesting to take different approaches in these designs. It makes the design process more fun as you get to travel a different path every time. As long as the function is well served and the design looks good and authentic, there should be no trouble in experimenting a bit :)

Palatino Arabic is available from Linotype and you can find it here.

A small note on the font:
If you like the design and would like me to work on more typefaces, please respect my intellectual property. Font piracy is the worst insult to a designer as it means that their work is worthless. I spent a lot of time on this and would appreciate your support and respect. Thank you!