History of Arabic Type Evolution from the 1930’s till present.

1. BRIEF HISTORY OF THE TRADITIONAL ARABIC TYPE.
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1.1 The origin of the Arabic script goes back to the first alphabets which were created by the Phoenicians. The Phoenicians were living on the costal area of Lebanon, Palestine and Syria. Since the Phoenicians were business traders sailing the Mediterranean, the alphabet influenced all the Mediterranean nations. The location of the middle-east being in the center of the ancient world (between the east and the west) also played a part in the spreading of the alphabet. So that is why the Phoenician alphabet is the mother of the Latin as well as the Arabic script.

Generating Arabic fonts

Developing and generating Arabic fonts is not as easy and straightforward as for Latin fonts.This article will cover Encoding, Glyph and Font naming, OpenType features and other topics concerning the preparation of an Arabic font before generating it.

Typographic Matchmaking: Arabic type with a Dutch flavor.

The long awaited ‘Typographic Matchmaking’ Book will be launched at a symposium and exhibition at Mediamatic in Amsterdam on the 24th of August 2007.

The following text is written by Huda Smitshuijzen AbiFarès:

The project began with the idea of creating Arabic type with a Dutch flavor in order to bring the high quality of Dutch type design to the rather underdeveloped Arabic design tradition.

Lebanese Graffiti

(for more Artistic lebanese Graffiti, you can also link to the new posts Bombing Beirut and Lebanese graffiti 02 of the new tags that were drawn in 2008 after this post was written.)

Nearly all of the graffiti in Lebanon over the past years were either 1. political words & sentences or 2. signage for shops or places. However, last week I was driving to Beirut and I have spotted a new graffiti that did not have either a political connotation to any political party or it was a signage for a shop. It is a pure social graffiti done by young Lebanese groups to express their feelings about Beirut.