Arabic Typography
Part of my job involves developing websites in multiple languages, and earlier this week the decision was made to produce an arabic version of a particular very flash-heavy website we did. It’s going to be an interesting challenge, as the website in question is one of those that emulates the action of turning pages in a book (needless to say it’s a pure marketing ‘teaser’ style website) and so the entire site will need to be reconfigured to right-to-left reading and page turning. Anyway, those are fairly straightforward technical details and shouldn’t take too long. What really occupies my time is selecting a new typeface for the site — we use Arno Pro for its wide range of language support, especially Cyrillic and Greek, and so the new arabic face should work well with it. And lo, just this evening I find Palatino Arabic in the Type Director’s Club 2008 winning entries. Perfect.
I’ve had this link stored for a little while now, waiting for me to explore further and write about it. I was initially taken by the use of arabic script to form directional signs (at right) and downloaded the beautifully designed and illustrated thesis by Luigi Farrauto. It’s well worth a look, even if you don’t read Italian. There’s a Q&A in English too:
Which are the main differences between the typography of arabic countries using arabic script and the one of non arabic country using arabic script?
I find that there is more typographic freedom within the Arab world that outside of it. There is a perception, or maybe that’s just how I see it, that Westerners are more focused on fully calligraphic styles for Arabic typefaces, and so they are unaware that we need other typefaces to suit our daily life. Calligraphic styles are great but you can’t set a dictionary in 5 pts size with that.
That’s what I noticed about the sign in the first place — clean, sans-serif (as it were) arabic type. OK, anyone who watched a news broadcast in 2003 would most likely have seen motorway signs written in arabic, but the films crews were hardly focusing on the finer details of the typography.
Lam-Alef ligatures
How has been faced the problem of vertical ligatures in typography?
Opentype provides us with GSUB (glyph substitution) lookups that can exchange a string of characters by a pre-designed ligature. That means that there is a large number of ligatures to be designed, and I’m not a fan of that. In my Naskh style typeface, I kept only horizontal stacking and so I have no ligatures except the Lam-Alef. I find that simpler to read and clearer.
This is also interesting. There are fonts that have been designed with loads of ligatures, but I guess sometimes, less is more.
I just read that the leading Arabic calligrapher, Khalil al-Zahawi, has been shot and killed in Baghdad.
Reaction to his death on the “Road to Iraq” blog which is where the example of his work (at right) is from. Click the link for more, and larger versions.
I lost the link to this site. I ended up spending nearly half an hour trawling Google Images until I found an image that was familiar! Then I was back on the portfolio site of Mouneer Al-Shaárani. He’s got some wonderful examples of quite remarkable calligraphy on there — I just wish I knew what they meant. Take the three examples below. It amazes me they can say anything at all and I wonder whether they’re as hard to read as those psychedelic posters from the sixties.
I have a strong attraction to calligraphy in general, but I am particularly fascinated by the possibilities afforded by arabic and persian scripts. I’ve seen many examples of arabic scripts in books, on buildings and posters, but I first came across anthropomorphic and zoomorphic calligraphy on this post on BibliOdyssey. Amazing stuff:
