Shahab Siavash
Hello,
First, I want to mention that I am a graphic designer and typographer. I was writing articles and books in the past few years about graphic and type design. Been awarded as a critic and have had several exhibitions in Iran and other countries. I’m usually into designing new modern Persian fonts, you may call them “fantasy” or “display” or… The name is not important. My well-known typeface was the first Persian grunge typeface (2005) which was featured on Behance in 2009 and has been published in several books and websites.
But today I’m going to talk about this (the attachments) typeface and why &
how I designed it.
We have all seen the very big difference between Latin and Persian alphabets.
One has vertical, almost isometric, mono-spaced letters and the other one has
ups and downs on and off the baseline, also different weights and widths are
another issue. When we use these two alphabets in a design, letters doesn’t
match. But we accept that, because there was no other choice.
So, years ago, I decided to do something about this and I realised that I should
change the Persian alphabet in a modern typographic way. I did these things:
1- Removed the connection between the letters. [All Persian (Arabic) letters are connected to each other unlike the Latin letters.] To do this I made the letters vertical oriented and separated from each other.
2- Once you decide to accomplish number 1, you realise that you should design the letters from scratch. So I did. Every single letter in this Persian alphabet is redesigned to fit this idea. But all of them are inspired by the original letters. Any Persian (Arabic) parson can read them. This is a typographic approach to design a modern Persian typeface.
3- After doing all of that, now there is no need to have 4 (or 2) forms for each letter. (Initial, medial, final and isolated glyphs) Therefore, this font performs like a Latin typeface and shows one form for each letter.
4- I also wanted to do this in an isometric and mono-spaced style. There are no angles except 90 degrees. I too, changed some of the Latin letters to reach this goal. (I want to mention that this is a new style to design Persian fonts and can be improved or changed through time by others in different ways.)
5- And to complete the fantasy, the typeface comes with 10 different weights! It enables the user to have a good experience with the typeface. The weights are: (See the attachments)
I. Light
II. Italic (For LTR)
III. Oblique (For RTL)
IV. Outline
V. Round
VI. Smooth
VII. Bold
IIX. Black
IX. Perspective
X. Distorted
Persian (Arabic) typefaces are very poor when it comes to fantasy or display ones. Especially Google Fonts doesn’t have a lot of them.
I hope it can be a good candidate to be in the GF.
Thanks for reading this,
Shahab Siavash
