| Arabic Type and Typography | All about Arabic typography, fonts, and type design |
Linotype is giving a great gift this Christmas season… Tweet, like, or add a comment here to get a chance to win Harmonia sans. The link takes you to a German website, but you could win if you add a comment, or tweet or like the blog post I linked to.
I shouldn’t be writing this. The project is confidential, and the timeline suicidal. Taking a break from spacing glyphs to write these words… I have never worked so hard or so fast, but this is a project one only dreams of, when it touches your heart and the design is an extension of a statement you wish to make. This project is a rebellion against silence, and I just had to post this… It feels so unbelievably good, to be able to draw, to tell a story, to breathe. Design is a way of life, and type design is my route.
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 makes me want to redesign my earlier typefaces, but that would be cheating, no?
A small note about the design, and I’ll expand on that later. What I’ve been trying to do since 2004 is to find a working solution as to how to pair Arabic with a Latin sans serif. My first attempt was Janna, quickly followed by Frutiger Arabic. A few years later came Neue Helvetica Arabic. All of these typefaces play in the grey area between Naskh and Kufi. They are all hybrids. I was always trying to find a mix that would allow that the typeface would have the presence of a Kufi, and the differentiated forms of the Naskh. Naskh is easier on the eyes (another post in itself) and there-in lies the problem. So, while all these 3 typefaces have had to migrated towards a Naskh construction, Univers Next Arabic is closer in look to a a Kufi. It almost mostly is. This gives it the stature, and elegance, that is inherent in Kufi styles. I would not set long texts in it, but it is looking gorgeous in headlines and short paragraphs. I hope you will like it too :)
The new blog look has the word “today” added to Arabic Type. The reason is quite simple: we are living in today, and the past, no matter how interesting, has already passed. When I started designing 10 years ago (I guess I’m getting older?), the state of available Arabic typefaces was dismal. Today, we are experiencing a renaissance of Arabic type design, and it keeps getting more interesting. There are many factors behind this explosion of new designs and new talent, and you can trace a few of them to the graphic design program at AUB in Beirut. Other factors are related to the socio-economic situation of the Arab world today, and the nature of the global economy and multinational corporations.
The world we live in TODAY is fast, constantly shifting, and often unrelenting. Our typography often needs to communicate this urgency. We do not live in a lyrical past. We live now, and there’s a train to catch up with. One day, when enough typefaces have been designed, we could relax and look back, and endulge in design for design’s sake. For now though, we have a lot of work to do.
I’ve been meaning to do this for at least a year. That, the wordpress update, and the war-on-spambots. But it’s been busy so it is only now that it’s done. I’m not fully convinced of the new look, but will test-drive it for a while. In the meantime though, there’s lots of interesting type designs coming soon, so stay tuned :)
Winsoft, the company that brought us InDesign ME and Tasmeem, has a very interesting interview with Robert Bringhurst. He needs no introduction, so just head over straight for some very interesting insights!
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 3 foundry labels: Linotype, Monotype, and ITC. And so, yes, all my Linotype typefaces can now be used on the web, as well as the other Arabic fonts in the libraries :)
Of course, Arabic is only a small part of the picture. Typographic doors have opened to more than 40 languages. It’s not only the western world that is seeing an explosion of typographic color on its screens, but other nations such as Russia, Japan, China, Korea, Thailand, India and the whole of the Middle East. This is the first time that typographic choice has been offered to so many at the same time. It is the democratisation of typography, and I am so thrilled to see it!
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 designers, discussing type design over tea and cake? Read more ›
… is a dangerous thing, and today proves this. When you start reading about eye movement (and this is my core PhD topic), a lot of texts go like: ok, so the eye movement is made up of jumps (called saccades) and times when the eye is stationary (fixations). You also have backward jumps (regressions) and things like return sweeps (end of line to the beginning of the next). When you actually do eye-tracking, or read the more detailed articles, it turns out that the eye is not really stationary during a fixation but is actually always moving. So you discover that there’s things called tremors, microsccades, and drifts… OK, not a problem. Read more ›
During research I came across an interesting article. Completely unrelated to legibility, but quite relevant to every day life. Here is the abstract:
Expanding upon Simon’s (1955) seminal theory, this investigation compared the choice-making strategies of maximizers and satisficers, finding that maximizing tendencies, although positively correlated with objectively better decision outcomes, are also associated with more negative subjective evaluations of these decision outcomes. Specifically, in the fall of their final year in school, students were administered a scale that measured maximizing tendencies and were then followed over the course of the year as they searched for jobs. Students with high maximizing tendencies secured jobs with 20% higher starting salaries than did students with low maximizing tendencies. However, maximizers were less satisfied than satisficers with the jobs they obtained, and experienced more negative affect throughout the job-search process. These effects were mediated by maximizers’ greater reliance on external sources of information and their fixation on realized and unrealized options during the search and selection process.