11.May.2009 Arabic Font Specimen Book
The book has been in the works for several years and it is now finally available. All the Linotype typefaces are of course included. I haven’t gotten my copy yet but I’m looking forward to it! Judging from the release photos it looks like there’s more than just type specimens and I’m curious to see [...]
11.Apr.2009 The story of Koufiya: Part III
One of the best things of studying at Reading was the trip we took to Rome and Florence, and that has nothing to with my fascination with all things Italian! We spent 5 days in Rome and 2 days in Florence looking at the best examples of Latin inscriptions with the notable exception of the [...]
08.Apr.2009 Fonts don’t grow on trees, so stop raiding my garden!
For the past 2 weeks I just keep coming across instances of illegal font usage of my fonts. One was Koufiya extracted from my Reading dissertation and available for download on a forum. The audacity is that they complained about a technical error in a unfinished, illegally obtained font. Wow! The second was a big [...]
27.Mar.2009 Koufiya on Facebook
My Arabic+Latin typeface Koufiya is now on Facebook. The benefits of that is that we can easily share comments and discussions without the hassle of all that spam…
25.Mar.2009 iPhone OS 3.0 to support Arabic?
Here is an interesting discussion of what it means to support a right-to-left reading direction. I’m not impressed with the UI font for Arabic, though. Wouldn’t it be cool if my Frutiger Arabic was in there? I wish!
04.Jan.2009 The story of Koufiya: Part II
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 [...]
31.Dec.2008 The story of Koufiya: Part I
Koufiya is not a typeface. Koufiya is an idea born through a war-torn childhood, a struggling region, and a great passion for design. Culture, politics, and design come together to mesh into a wish for open communication and equal status. Koufiya is about dialogue and harmony among opposites. It’s about co-existence without the loss of [...]
27.Oct.2008 “A job well done on all your fonts!”
Thank you to everyone who is sending these wonderful messages of support. I recently got great feedback from Mustapha Sabra from Qatar and it went like this: “Hello Nadine, This is just an email to say thank you! Your typefaces have inspired me as a designer to concentrate on design assured that I am backed [...]
13.Aug.2008 Yes the triplets ARE here…
Koufiya has finally arrived!! And so did Janna and Badiya! More info here.
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, [...]