Aisha update brings swashes and more alternates, packed into a variable font

Since Aisha was conceived some fourteen years ago, Arabic type design has advanced and broadened. Now there are more and more diverse contributions to the field, yet the Maghrebi style remains a minority interest. Only a few new typefaces that follow one or the other variant of this style have been published since, and whilst […]

Justin Howes Memorial Lecture 2019

On 21 February 2005, Justin Howes died suddenly and unexpectedly of heart failure. He was 41 years old and inmidst of his PhD research at the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication in Reading, UK. Justin investigated aspects of type-making in the ‘long eighteenth century’, and presented a talk about ‘Extreme Type’ at Reading’s postgraduate […]

Non-Latin?

At the recent Face/Interface exhibition (for which the domain must have bought before settling on the show’s final name), and the concomitant conference organised at the library of the Stanford University, participants were invited to give their take on the following question:   ‘Non-Latin’ is a peculiar term, defined negatively rather than affirmatively—by what it […]

Subtext: Typedesign. zeitgenössisch–lokal: contemporary–austrian

The typographische gesellschaft austria has organised the must ambitious exhibition of Austrian type design to date. ‘Subtext: Typedesign. zeitgenössisch–lokal: contemporary–austrian’ is on show in the Design Forum in the Viennese Museumsquartier from April 12 to May 26, 2017. The vernissage on April 11 was a great success and the venue crammed with visitors. Last week […]

Nassim 2.0 released

On May 17, 2006, I was in the process of defining Arabic mark positions for Nassim in a roundabout process involving a dummy FontLab MultipleMaster file, custom export scripts and Microsoft’s beloved Visual OpenType Layout Tool – VOLT. I was a Master’s student at the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication at the University of […]