The program at Reading benefits from having great staff that are there to patiently instill design awareness into our souls. If it weren’t for Gerard, Gerry, and Fiona, where would we all be today? It’s always fun to go back to the early sketches and wonder at how lousy we were. Or at least, how lousy my own sketches were. Amazingly, we only got encouragement and support.
Koufiya Arabic is based on Early Kufi in terms of its initial conception and its governing principles. As I was designing the Arabic and Latin at the same time, I needed to find a style of Latin that sits well with Arabic. All through January I tried many different options. The image above reflects one of the basic concepts of the latin, that there are sudden sharp turns in angle. Still, it wasn’t working well.
One of the directions I tried was to look back at historical references to try to bring back a calligraphic influence, in this case Creci. The design was interesting but did not go well with the Arabic.
The Creci direction was interesting but too raw, so I tried to normalise it and went ahead with a serf version. I also dropped this direction as it did not fit my Arabic.
The Arabic at this point was in its initial phase but starting to take shape. I had a good feeling that this would be the way to follow but it still had a long way to go.
I felt that the Arabic was still quite stiff so I thought to go back to sketching by hand and to try to soften the curves a bit. It is my habit to draw very rough sketches. I rarely have nice and clean sketches. The design is usually in my head and I just need to scribble it down. If there is anything regret, it’s the fact that I don’t draw much.
In the above image I got to the basic concept of Koufiya Arabic. The design of the Beh would follow this sketch quite closely.
And in this sketch I got to the design concept of the Latin. I designed this after JFP visited us and took a look at our work. It all clicked in my head then, and I looked at the structure as the solution to the dilemma. So far, I had been dressing up the 2 scripts in similar fashion, but the underlying bodies were not speaking together at all. The solution was to bring the structures into dialogue. The Arabic had very strong horizontals and quite shallow curves with sharp sudden twists in direction. I tried to bring that into my Latin and voila! The pieces started to fit, but it was in no way yet a solved case.
To be continued…