07.Feb.2011 Palatino Sans Arabic wins award and Egypt is still on fire
Never before have I felt it so strongly, that design without a cultural purpose is headed to the dustbins of history. Surely design is meant for more than just ephemera? Two weeks ago I was informed that my Palatino Sans Arabic has won a TDC award for typographic excellence. No need to describe, I was [...]
07.Dec.2010 Univers Next Arabic and The Guardian
Today is big: my Univers Next Arabic is released, and there’s a feature about me in the Guardian. Univers Next Arabic is everything that I’ve wanted to design. It has the modernity of a low-contrast typeface, the cleanliness and strength of curves, and an overall look that makes you want to just keep looking. It also [...]
14.Sep.2010 Arabic webfonts now available
Today is very special for anyone wanting to read in Arabic online. The choice of fonts available to set Arabic online has dramatically increased overnight. Yesterday we had a handful, today we have more than ten times as many. How? Monotype Imaging has launched its webfonts services today and the offering includes fonts from its [...]
02.Jun.2010 An afternoon with Hermann Zapf
A while ago I had the great opportunity to visit, with 2 colleagues from Linotype, Prof. Hermann Zapf and his most lovely and talented wife Gudrun Zapf-von-Hesse in their house in Darmstadt. As with every other visit, the Zapfs were the most congenial of hosts. What better afternoon can you spend, than that with legendary [...]
17.Apr.2010 Novum: 7 Arabic typefaces you should know about
I was recently asked by Germany’s Novum magazine to write a short feature about my pick of Arabic typefaces that their readers would want to know about. For this I could choose from both my designs as well as others’. It’s never easy to make a small selection, and this was the case here. How [...]
18.Feb.2010 Recently…
I have been quite silent lately and so this post is long overdue. To recap some highlights of the recent months… In December Linotype released my Neue Helvetica Arabic. It was a very tough project to take on, but I was happy to take on the challenge. The response to it has been largely positive. [...]
14.Aug.2009 Frutiger Arabic gets 4 new condensed fonts
I always liked condensed fonts and now I’m happy to report that the bestselling Frutiger Arabic family has 4 new additions that are also part of the Linotype library.
11.Jul.2009 Janna on Al-Jazeera English
Here is an interesting interview with Huda Smitshuijzen AbiFares on Arabic typography and Arab-Dutch collaborations. Janna, which is not one of the Khatt projects but was featured in the Typographic Matchmaking book, can be seen at 02:30.The text is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
06.Jun.2009 Arabic fonts for mobile
I read an interesting article on type design for mobile devices. What are the characteristics that one should look for in a font? What works best? As type designers, we’ve been mostly preoccupied with print design because that’s the biggest playing field that we’ve been allowed into. There’s been a lot of interesting work done [...]
03.Jun.2009 A big day for Arabic on the web
Monotype Imaging has announced support for the use of Embedded OpenType (EOT) for non-commercial websites (full press release is here). This covers the whole Linotype, Monotype, and ITC typeface libraries. Why is this so great for Arabic? The Linotype Library has a lot of interesting Arabic typefaces (including mine!) and this new End User License [...]