Editorial and book design is a discipline we very much enjoy working in, particularly because it embodies every designer’s passion for printed matters and tactile quality. Book design is after all one of the earliest form of graphic design as we define it today; and has become nowadays a refreshing traditional design medium in an increasingly digital world.

Earlier this year we had the opportunity to work on an appealing book design project: “We’ll make our homes here: Sudan at the Referendum”- published by the United Nations Mission in Sudan and joining Tim McKulka’s formidable photographs with reflections on Sudanese identity from various Sudanese writers. The project was of great interest to us at Tarek Atrissi Design: on one hand it touched on a timely political subject, the declaration of the independence of southern Sudan, and the socio-cultural implications that lead to and will eventually result from this change. On the other hand, this was a bilingual book design project, in Arabic and English, bringing with it the typical challenges that we face in any of our multilingual design projects.

“We’ll Make Our Homes Here” is the first book to include photography from all 25 Sudanese states. It is also the last book to do so after the conclusion of a conflict that spanned five decades with the birth of a new nation: The Republic of South Sudan. McKulka’s photographs show Sudan in all its topographical and human variety: very diverse natural landscapes (from deserts to mountains all the way to the capital of Khartoum) together with a  varied mix of ethnicities (Nomads, Arab traders and Tribal groups). This book about Sudan, the largest country in Africa, is a capture through the eyes and words of Sudanese people who witnessed their country’s transformation as it happened. The book’s 13 essays - addressing everything from political analysis and journalism to fiction and poetry - are mostly very personal, and some nostalgic, remembering the cosmopolitan Khartoum of the 1960s, or reflecting on the notion and meaning of the Sudanese identity.

From a design point of view, the book was an exciting challenge. It was certainly not difficult to showcase the incredibly rich photography of the New York based photographer Tim McKulka. As a matter of fact, we aimed to keep the layout of the book as minimal as possible in order to let the rich photography speaks for itself and to have it as the highest hierarchy of the book’s structural elements (grid, typography and imagery). The main design challenges were of course resulting from the bilingual nature of the book: establishing a navigational system through the publication that works in presenting the different levels of content regardless of the choice of reading language. The book has two distinct, yet somehow similarly structured sections: an Arabic right to left book side and another Latin left to right side - each containing the essays in the respective language. The photographs in each section where however different, and the bilingual system adopted to the captions carries the readers across the entire book regardless of their choice of reading language.

The typographic decisions were made with the goal of creating harmony and balance between the Arabic and English pages. Title and text fonts were chosen in order to fit the large format of the book and facilitate the reading experience by fitting well within the chosen page and layout proportions.

“We’ll make our homes here” is published in a limited print run. The next step of the project will be publishing the book digitally in the form of an iPad application: a similar bilingual challenge in a totally different and rather new medium. A step we are very excited about, as it combines our passions for interface design and reaching audience across cultures.

Arabic Type design and development remains one of our key areas of focus at Tarek Atrissi Design. This year hasn’t been an exception, and we have worked on a couple of high profile type design projects which we will be showcasing soon (probably by end of the year). Meanwhile, we showcase below a selection of custom and self initiated fonts that we previously designed - between 2008 and 2010- and that we haven’t had the chance yet to preview them on our blog or website.

Alif Alif Font:

Alif Alif typeface was conceived for a new TV and Radio channel in Saudi Arabia. The Arabic and Latin custom designed fonts come in a family of 5 weights: Light, regular, italics, Bold and Extra Bold.
Shown above are samples from the type specimen, and below are samples of the font usage as part of the advertising campaign for the radio channel.

Khoutout Font:

Based on an initial design we have made for a custom Arabic font as part of a TV channel identity system, Khoutout font was significantly adjusted and developed further as a design over the last 3 years to create a visually distinct and recognizable Arabic typeface suitable for use as a display font in corporate identity programs. Khoutout, meaning “lines” in Arabic, is composed out of two parallel lines with a negative white space in between.

It is available for purchase and licensing in our Arabic Font Shop at www.arabictypography.com.

Ahmad Magazine

Starting as a commission to design a custom Arabic typeface for the titles of the Lebanese children’s magazine “Ahmad”, the font is now used as well by Dar Al Hadaek publishing house for book cover titles and as a text font in some selected children’s books. The font, designed in three weights, has a friendly look and feel yet is classic in its overall design and is therefore easy to read for Arabic children. It has been vigorously tested and adjusted over the period of two years based on analyzing published samples of the magazine.

Nokia Arabic:

A custom designed Arabic font for Nokia Middle East and Iran, mostly for use in web, print and outdoor marketing as well as various advertising material. The Arabic font, designed in three weights, was the result of a lengthy design process - defining the needs for Arabic typographic communication at the time while visually balancing the used typographic guidelines of Nokia. Shown below are samples of the font in use, in large outdoor advertising in the streets of Amman, Jordan.

Sagia:

This is a custom Arabic fonts family for Sagia - Saudi Arabia General Investment Authority - consisting of 6 weights. The Arabic typeface was designed as an adaptation for an existing Latin serif font which shares with it a similar weight and features, yet retain its own characteristics as an Arabic script. Below is a type specimen of the font in its varying weights.

Al Hawadi font:

Al Hawadi Arabic typeface consists of two weights, regular and bold. It was a custom design for the King Abdulaziz Economic City in Saudi Arabia, designed to work along with a Latin sans serif font. Previews of the font and the basic character set are shown in the image below.

by Tarek Atrissi

One of the main challenges facing a practicing designer is staying creatively inspired and constantly seeking ways to refresh your skills.  Every year, I present myself with various options on how to break my “work routine”, in order to reinvent my design approach and to get new sources of creativity. Last year, I explored the “nomad office” experience. Earlier this year, I took a bolder step with an “educational break;” I put my professional work aside and enrolled in a full time postgraduate typeface design course, the type@cooper program in New York, offered by the Cooper Union University in conjunction with TDC, the Type Directors Club.

I joined the program with a very specific agenda in mind. Continuing education is an absolute must for every designer, and I felt that enrolling in such an intensive program would be refreshing personally and professionally after eight years of continuous professional work in my Netherlands based studio, Tarek Atrissi Design.

I also wanted to expand my horizon in the world of type design, building on my expertise in Arabic type design and getting more in depth knowledge into the key typeface design principles: technique, technology, aesthetics, expression, history, and theory. My goal was to challenge my established working habits, polish some new technical skills, enrich my typographic culture and explore new possibilities in approaching the type of bilingual typeface design commissions I frequently get.
Most importantly, I wanted to build on my academic foundation in support of my parallel teaching career. I have been giving courses and workshops across the Arab world in lettering and Arabic typography, and felt this course would be an enriching source for new classroom material.

The program, with its 162 in-class hours, exceeded promised expectations. Veteran type designer Sumner Stone, former type director at Adobe Systems, was the lead instructor. He focused on the study of letterform - historical to modern - both by practice (drawing and writing) and theory, by offering an excellent lectures series.
The practical focus of the course was a wonderful reminder of the great and necessary benefits of manual sketching in type design.

Uppercase-focused exercises included drawing the skeleton of the letters VERBSGOHUMAN from the Inguvine tablet V, the bronze tablet dating from the second century BC. This gave us a chance to examine the “essential forms” of letters -  in this case from a very specific historic reference. A reminder of the first things the letter-craftsman can do to define the simplest necessary forms that preserve the characteristic structure, distinctiveness, and proportions of each individual letter; before building further on these skeleton forms to render them with a final formal or informal character.

Lowercase-focused studies included writing minuscule letters with the edged pen based on model letterforms written in 1425 by Poggio Bracciolini and experimenting with the order, direction, thickness and angle of the broad edged nib. The most beneficial part of all the manual work was the realization that a hand sketch could be the perfect basis for approaching problematic glyph design while designing a typeface, even when working fully on a digital type-sculpting platform. Taking the habit to draw the letters repetitively before designing it helped tremendously in understanding the structure of the letter and its construction- and in understanding the components that are common to sets of specific letters. These writing exercises were very helpful as well in exploring practical links between Arabic Calligraphy, Arabic Typography, as well as the Latin writing structure. The discussions raised in classes about the challenges of creating a design relationship between the Latin upper case alphabet and its lowercase counterpart echoed to a big extent the challenges existing in any attempt to match the Arabic script to the Latin one within a bilingual design context.

The most exciting part of the type@Cooper experience was with no doubt the access provided to some of the best typographic collections New York City has to offer: The Morgan Library & Museum; The Butler Library at Colombia University; The Grolier Club; and the wonderful collection at the Herb Lubalin typography study center at the Cooper Union. All these collections were incredibly rich with historic type specimens, from both the United States and Europe (plenty of Dutch typographic references that I enjoyed tracing their origins). However, the most valuable find was the wealth of Arabic typographic material available among these collections. Particularly interesting was seeing the original Manuale Tipografico and Bodoni’s original Arabic Type Design, one of 24 different scripts he has worked on in his career.

The access to these historic material raised significant discussions on reviving typefaces, and how one specific source of historical inspiration could be interpreted very differently by different people. In his inspiring lecture on reviving typefaces, Matthew Carter compared type to music: music can’t be reproduced in the exact same way; there are qualities associated with every performance, and each performance of a symphony is a critique of it. Personal interpretation is hence inevitable in any type revival process. The elaborate case study presented by Sumner Stone on the making of ITC Bodoni was an equally enriching in-depth look at the process of reviving Bodoni’s original type.

The technical focus of the course was a chance to advance my font production skills to a new level, with the excellent bulletproof font production trainings provided by some of the key staff at Hoefler & Frere-Jones (Sara Soskolne and Andy Clymer).
This included exploring efficient ways to use the expert’s tricks in Fontlab for creating the most supportive working environment; Looking at the best approaches to properly setting the inter-character spacing of fonts; Great ways to master bezier curves and drawing the smoothest and most agreeable curves for optimized rendering in print and on screen. Most importantly, writing and testing complex Open Type features and looking at typical difficulties in generating and testing fonts, as well as dealing with font naming tables.

Set within such an excellent typographic environment, the resources and support provided for designing type were exceptional. My time in New York was spent mostly drawing letters, and working on the development of a new bilingual font that I will be soon adding to the list of fonts I have designed over the last decade, and have it available on our Arabic Font Shop. A typeface that I got the chance to have it critiqued by some of the world most recognized type designers, including Matthew Carter, Jonathan Hoefler, Ken Barber, among others. More so, it is a typeface project I have been able to allocate a lot of time to; a refreshing privilege since most of the typefaces I create are custom fonts that are needed for branding projects that usually impose challenging and stressful deadlines.
The untitled font is still “work in progress.” It will probably be finalized towards the end of this year. Included below are some basic sneak previews of the design process and how the typeface’s overall character is taking shape. The main concept behind it was challenging conventional solutions adopted when designing a Latin typeface complementing and echoing an Arabic script in spirit; while maintaining the authenticity of each script without being limited by the over-concern of visually matching the appearances of the Latin and Arabic scripts.

The experience at Type@Cooper was an amazing opportunity to work with leading industry practitioners and meet a talented group of type-obsessed design professionals from all around the globe. This was definitely an adventure I was very proud to fit in my incredibly busy working life, allowing me to take part of a pioneering new level of type design education in the US.

Beyond all that, it allowed me the chance once again to promote Arabic Design and Typography by giving a lecture about Arabic Type design at the Cooper Union, for a wide audience interested in non-Latin type, where I showcased the general challenges accompanying Arabic typography design and practices today, with an analysis of the social and cultural dynamics of the modern Arab world and its resulting influence on the Arabic digital letterform design.

by Tarek Atrissi

For the past couple of years we have been working regularly on building the visual identity for the Faculty of Arts, Media and Technology at the Utrecht School of the Arts in the Netherlands (HKU). Since then, we have designed several of their publications as well as a series of sub-identities for specific academic programs initiated by the school as part of the whole visual identity.

Early in 2009 we were asked to develop a new visual identity for the Faculty in Hilversum. The school, with its expanding new programs, aimed at lifting its house-style through a new image. Their main objective was to visually accentuate the Faculty’s independence from the central school in Utrecht. Our creative process focused on achieving this goal by creating a solid and consistent identity, which we have been using this past year on a variety of printed and digital promotional material we designed for the school.

The visual style developed from combining rough manual sketches with bold tight-set typography and a bolder set of colors. The variety of hand drawn doodles used highlights the creative process of the students, and is meant as a contrast with their final outcome of digital media projects: Emphasizing hence on the sketching part of the process as a fundamental aspect in conceptualizing and visualizing digital media art. Our main challenge with the identity was to allow the usage of visuals from students’ projects, often stylistically different, without loosing the school’s visual identity or consistency throughout. This is another reason why typography acts as a main component of the identity, as it unifies different visual material regardless of variation in styles.

Among the different materials we designed were the vertical signature brochures of the school, which we printed on heavy-stock rough paper to enhance the raw feel of the visual identity and complement the bold typography and colors used. Other items we designed varied from animation, packaging, postcards, posters and stationery.

by Tarek Atrissi

Since our start as a design studio, we have been heavily involved in designing original Arabic typefaces, and through our 10 years of design practice at Tarek Atrissi Design, we have left a visible mark on the typographic landscape. Our fonts are to be seen used across the Arab world, in print, on air, on newspaper headlines and as part of elaborate corporate identity systems. The last two years haven’t been an exception: we have designed several corporate and custom Arabic (and bilingual) fonts for different clients, many of which we haven’t posted yet on our blog or website.

One font I am particularly proud of and excited about is the font I am sharing in this blog post. The custom display font for the Arab Museum of Modern Art, “Mathaf”, a new museum opening today in Doha - Qatar through its inaugural exhibition “Sajjil”. The Arabic and Latin font is the result of months of intensive work, and is one of the main components in the visual identity and branding adopted for the museum.

Unlike many of the typical briefs we usually get for designing custom fonts, this typeface design commission for such a high profile organization was really out of the box. It challenged us to put into it the creativity and experimentation that we usually put into self initiated type design projects. The bilingual typeface we were asked to design was more of an artist experimentation: It had to look far from a digital typeface, but rather a hand scribble; a personal signature; a quick spontaneous-looking hand writing that looks more like a scribble taken from an artist’s sketchbook. This request was a particular design challenge. Especially for an Arabic font as anyone would imagine: Creating the illusion of a hand written scribble in a script that has connected letters was a tough task. Which might explain why as a matter of fact there aren’t this sort of digital Arabic fonts available out there.

The design process was very exciting and defined by experimentation. In the first phases of the project we explored all sort of manual lettering work. The focus was on finding the right formula to create a spontaneous writing style, while keeping in mind the challenge of matching the Arabic and Latin parts of the font to communicate the same spirit. There is basically nothing we did not try: Creating metallic brushes from Coca-Cola cans and writing with it; Graffiti writing on large newspaper sheets; Asking extended family to write quickly in charcoal pens; and looking in our archive for collected old Arabic newspapers which still used manual hand calligraphy for typesetting all headlines. Several design rounds made us finally use the outcome of a specific handwriting that filled in our stack of sketches. This material was scanned, digitized, and then developed and refined further to create the basis of the design. Twenty two rounds of presentations were needed to polish the final design. The final character set, particularly in Arabic, included a wide set of ligatures that allowed a more natural flow of the script. The final design echoed in one way or another some of the initial inspirations we used while developing this typeface: street hand made lettering that could be found in different sizes, forms and textures- and that I have for long documented as part of my visual research. Previews of the final font, as well as some selected samples of from the process, are shown as part of the images showcased here.

Above: Preview images of the process development of the design

Without being labeled as an Arabic font with calligraphic features or a font with contemporary typographic features, the Mathaf-script typeface is above all a font reflecting a personal expression. An expression that is maybe typical to any piece present in a Museum of Modern Art.

To me personally, regardless of the final outcome of the design, the simple fact that we were commissioned for this project is a double rewarding honor: On one hand, it is a confirmation that the type of Arabic fonts we have often focused on developing are highly in demand: Fonts designed by graphic designers for graphic designers; fonts that have strong characters and that are ideal for usage in corporate design and branding context, and that are designed to communicate a very specific mood or message. On the other hand, by being asked to take part of visualizing the written voice of “Mathaf”, we are in one way or another given the honor of being part of Arab modern art, typographically speaking at least.

Above: Samples of the font usage within the branding and identity system of Mathaf. Showing the countdown posters for the opening event; application of the font on pins and printed matters; and screenshots from promotional video using the font for on-screen titles.