Film-Farsi, an Arabic and Latin display typeface

[Borna Izadpanah]

Hello friends!

 

I am an Iranian type designer based in London and have recently completed a MA in Typeface Design at the University of Reading. For my MA I designed a multi-script typeface family(Arabic, Latin and Avestan) originally intended for news on different platforms and surfaces. I also wrote a dissertation on The typographic development of the Nasta’liq style, 1770s-2000.

 

I am beginning to work on a new Arabic and Latin display typeface that I have called Film-Farsi. I have attached a brief introduction to this project that I would greatly appreciate if you could take a look at. All suggestions are welcomed. 

 

The first sketches will be uploaded very soon!

 

All the very best,

Borna

[Borna Izadpanah]

The project is now up on GitHub (here) and just to give you an idea of the general direction here is a snapshot. I have started with the Arabic and shall soon add the Latin.

[Dave Crossland]

Awesome!

[Borna Izadpanah]

Few more characters are added. So far I have designed: alef, beh, peh, teh, theh, dal, thal, reh, zain, jeh, seen, sheen, tah, zah, noon and waw.

On Wednesday, October 7, 2015 at 12:24:57 PM UTC+1, Dave Crossland wrote:

Awesome!

[Borna Izadpanah]

More characters: jeem, tche, hah, khah, sad, dad, feh, veh and qaf.

[Borna Izadpanah]

Few more characters are added. ain, ghain, yeh, lam-alif.

[Borna Izadpanah]

The basic Perso-Arabic character set is completed. It still needs some serious polishing but the core idea is almost there. Many of the letters are treated differently from what is seen on the film posters and I have done this knowingly. I did not want to simply revive the lettering but to add my own mark and try to improve the quality of the shapes in my own way. For instance letters such as hah, ain, meem and feh have very little in common with their references.

The next step is to design the numerals, ligatures, punctuations and of course start the Latin counterpart.

I very much welcome any comments or critics on what has been done so far.

 

[Mohamed Gaber]

Hello Borna, 

I've been following your project since you started and happy to see the development going great, 

I like the concept and how it is being developed and having a close look to the last file you attached i see some little details that might need fixing/revising..

the below two horizontal dots and the three dots are touching and I'm worried it would be confusing in forms like يپيع ييپيييي the dots will be touching and on small size text it will be an issue 

​the same issue happening here but with ر and the following letter with bellow dots 

​here the upper three dots are touching with the following letter 

​

The seen-fina and seen, i think you should reconsider raising the final tooth a little bit right now seen has the same exact shape of the noon fina 

i think the final tooth of the seen need to be raised even a little bit to to give it more the visual character of a seen.

these are my comments for now hope i was helpful

cheers, 

Gaber

​

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Skype: che.guebara | Twitter: @Gue3bara

[Borna Izadpanah]

Hi Mohamed,

Thank you so much for taking the time to go through the design and I am glad to hear you like the typeface so far.

I agree with all your points. Generally dot positioning needs serious improvement, however, I have some ideas how to fix the overlapping problems. 

The seen’s final tooth was something that I tried but it seems that it doesn’t work. Basically in Nastaliq style the final tooth is relatively flat and I wanted to imitate that feature. Not successful anyway and I shall redesign it.

 

Please keep in touch.

All the best,

Borna

[Mohamed Gaber]

The the final tooth in the seen in Nastaliq has a little bump not totally flat and i think thats what you need here try it out and see how it will be

Cheers

Gaber

[Borna Izadpanah]

Yes, that's what I am going to try.

Thanks

[Borna Izadpanah]

Arabic fusions (ligatures) are added. (More will be added soon) 

Some of the letters such as sad, tah, heh, meem, and yeh are redrawn. 

Most of the overlapping letters are adjusted. (There are still a few that need fixing)

All criticism or feedback is welcome!

[Dave Crossland]

I suggest porting your test docs from PDF to HTML and using gh-pages, as in http://tarobish.github.io/Jomhuria/

Lasse, would you be able to do a hangout with Borna this week to answer any questions he has about this?

[Borna Izadpanah]

This looks great! I'll check it out and try to make it work. 

[Borna Izadpanah]

I have been trying to find the right tone for the Latin counterpart of Film-Farsi Arabic. My intention is to design a Latin type that is not only a visual match but is also similar in concept. Therefore, I am using some of the characteristics brush lettering to match the informal appearance of the Arabic type.

This is just the initial attempt and has many inconsistencies but to give you an idea of the general direction I am posting it here.

 

 

[Eben Sorkin]

The variable I might play with in the latin are width, weight and scale. 

I wonder if a slightly less wide design might match better. The color is very similar which is nice. I find the Latin seems slightly darker however. The Latin also feels a bit bigger, like it talks louder perhaps. If the latin was a bit smaller overall that might be useful. Just ideas to try.

Best!

-e.

On Nov 4, 2015, at 12:33 PM, Borna Izadpanah <borna...@googlemail.com> wrote:

I have been trying to find the right tone for the Latin counterpart of Film-Farsi Arabic. My intention is to design a Latin type that is not only a visual match but is also similar in concept. Therefore, I am using some of the characteristics brush lettering to match the informal appearance of the Arabic type.

This is just the initial attempt and has many inconsistencies but to give you an idea of the general direction I am posting it here.

 

 

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<FilmFarsi_Test_04nov2015.pdf>

[Borna Izadpanah]

Thank you very much Eben.

I have had this problem before. I tend to design the Latin rather wide.

I am going to apply your comments and will post the updated file soon.

On Wednesday, November 4, 2015 at 6:38:20 PM UTC, Eben Sorkin wrote:

The variable I might play with in the latin are width, weight and scale. 

I wonder if a slightly less wide design might match better. The color is very similar which is nice. I find the Latin seems slightly darker however. The Latin also feels a bit bigger, like it talks louder perhaps. If the latin was a bit smaller overall that might be useful. Just ideas to try.

Best!

-e.

On Nov 4, 2015, at 12:33 PM, Borna Izadpanah <borna...@googlemail.com> wrote:

I have been trying to find the right tone for the Latin counterpart of Film-Farsi Arabic. My intention is to design a Latin type that is not only a visual match but is also similar in concept. Therefore, I am using some of the characteristics brush lettering to match the informal appearance of the Arabic type.

This is just the initial attempt and has many inconsistencies but to give you an idea of the general direction I am posting it here.

 

 

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[Eben Sorkin]

My suggestion would be to make versions that you are certain are too small, too light, and too narrow and then with a tool that can handle multiple axis of variance such as Superpolator or maybe Glyphs find the spot in that 3 variable design space that makes the sweetest match. I am suggesting that you try it this way because each of these variables will interact with the others where getting a similar color is concerned. Do you have access to this kind of tool? 

Q: What kind of script is it at the bottom of the image here?

http://www.borna.design/

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[Borna Izadpanah]

I don't have the Superpolator app but I'll try it to do what I can with the Glyphs. I am not sure if Glyphs does exactly what Superpolator does thought. 

Q: What kind of script is it at the bottom of the image here?

Avestan. 

[Dave Crossland]

On 5 November 2015 at 03:38, Borna Izadpanah <borna...@googlemail.com> wrote:

I don't have the Superpolator app but I'll try it to do what I can with the Glyphs. I am not sure if Glyphs does exactly what Superpolator does thought. 

Glyphs is sufficient for this. If you can get ahold of Manuel von Gebhardi who is MATD this year, he might be able to assist you with what I call his 'mini-metapolator', https://github.com/Manuel87/Type_Multiverse

I agree with Eben's comments, and additionally I don't like the inclination :) I think you can get the punchy-ness while maintaining a much more upright overall texture.

https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Luckiest+Guy

[Borna Izadpanah]

Very well then. I am going to find a more upright solution. Back to sketching. 

[Dave Crossland]

On Nov 5, 2015 4:20 PM, "Borna Izadpanah" <borna...@googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> Very well then. I am going to find a more upright solution. Back to sketching. 

Our goal is something widely useful and popular :)

[Borna Izadpanah]

Brand new Latin in progress. The new Latin is upright and a more squarish. I am now working on a darker and slightly bigger Latin in order to find the right colour and optical size.

I have also redesigned the teeth and the counters (eyes) of the Arabic. I realised that teeth may not be visible enough and some of the counters were very small.

[Catherine Leigh Schmidt]

Borna, what a cool project. Love the forms of the film posters and how you've interpreted them. The squarish, chunkiness is quite appealing.

While I can't comment on the Persio-Arabic, I could wish for a bit more angularity in the Latin to match. The forms feel a bit too round and "buttoned down" relative to the Arabic. Perhaps just a little more of the brush feeling. Of course you have to balance idiosyncrasy with appeal and ease of use, but with a display face I think you could get away with it.

p.s. Love the Lida specimen!

[Borna Izadpanah]

Hi Catherine,

Thank you so much for your kind words and I’m really glad that you like my work. I agree about the Latin needing more angularity. I have already worked on it and will soon post here.  

Cheers.

[Borna Izadpanah]

Arabic numbers + a more angular Latin. 

[Borna Izadpanah]

Finally, after few weeks I’m back. Unfortunately, my iMac passed away and left me alone with a lot of unfinished projects. I just acquired a new iMac and started working on FilmFarsi again. The GitHub repository needs to be organised but I’m posting this pdf just to show you how the typeface is progressing. 

I’m now working on the Latin and will post the updates very soon. 

[Borna Izadpanah]

Here is the Urdu prototype. Is there anyone here who can give me feedback on Urdu? (Ideally an Urdu speaking person)

[Borna Izadpanah]

The FilmFarsi Arabic is at its final stages. I spent most of the last days refining the Urdu characters and ligatures. Although it is very difficult to imitate the Urdu characters – which are based on Nasta’liq style – in a typeface like FilmFarsi I have deliberately tried to come up with a decent solution. The last slide in this pdf shows an Udru sentence with and without the ligatures.   

I would love to know an Urdu reader's opinion about this.   

[Dave Crossland]

Hi

An Urdu speaker, Sharjeel, says, "All looks pretty good except the isolated and the final form of چ which needs reworking; the inconsistent small size of three dots are hard to read."

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Cheers
Dave

[Borna Izadpanah]

Thanks Dave,

I'm happy to hear Sharjeel thinks the typeface is "pretty good". (Please thank him for me)

The letter چ is a tricky one – particularly in the very dark typefaces like FilmFarsi – and I totally understand what he is talking about. So far I haven't been able to find or see a better alternative than making the dots smaller. 

Making the belly of the چ larger would make it very deep and reduces the boldness. This is obviously a compromise but here are some other examples from other typefaces. 

Besides, I have worked on the Arabic diacritics and mark positioning and here is how it looks. (pdf)

 

[Khaled Hosny]

One idea is to cur the lower stroke the belly (a common thing in Indian
Naskh, even for ح and ع), though it might look a bit weird as well.


Regards,
Khaled

On Wed, Dec 16, 2015 at 12:31:25PM -0800, Borna Izadpanah wrote:
> Thanks Dave,
>
> I'm happy to hear Sharjeel thinks the typeface is "pretty good". (Please
> thank him for me)
>
> The letter چ is a tricky one – particularly in the very dark typefaces like
> FilmFarsi – and I totally understand what he is talking about. So far I

> haven't been able to find or see a better alternative thank making the dots

> smaller.
> Making the belly of the چ larger would make it very deep and reduces the

> boldness. This is obviously a compromise but here are some other examples.
>
> <https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-7Yv_zu0jZ4Q/VnHJnka6_3I/AAAAAAAAAlE/ZYAwbS88Qfc/s1600/Screen%2BShot%2B2015-12-16%2Bat%2B20.20.02.png>

>
> Besides, I have worked on the Arabic diacritics and mark positioning and
> here is how it looks. (pdf)
>
>

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[Borna Izadpanah]

Hi Khaled,

I have seen that in some of the modern Arabic typefaces as well but personally I rather have smaller dots for چ than cutting the letter. 

Cheers

[Borna Izadpanah]

I redesigned the belly of the چ to nest larger dots. 

 

[Borna Izadpanah]

1. Special Arabic glyphs.

2. More work on the vowel marks and their positioning. 

3. Redesigning some of the characters such as, final heh, heh doachashmee, medial and final ain and hah. 

4. More ligatures. (Particularly Urdu and Persian). 

5. Better spacing.

The Arabic typeface is almost done. It just needs a little bit of polishing and then kerning. 

[Borna Izadpanah]

I'm now working on the harmonisation of the Arabic and Latin. 

The Latin counterpart is relatively less developed and needs more work.

[Borna Izadpanah]

The Arabic and Latin character sets are nearly complete. 

I'm now doing the final polishing, improving the spacing and ultimately kerning. 

Attached is the most random text to show how the typeface looks like so far. 

[Borna Izadpanah]

The complete Arabic character set. 

Any final comment or feedback is highly appreciated. 

[Dave Crossland]

Hi Borna

I would like to request changing the name from "Film Farsi" in the
final release, as I've understood this is a development name, and I
don't like to see script/language names in font family names. The
reason is that, by default in most browsers today, the Google Fonts
API will serve the western latin subset only, and web developers must
opt-in to other subsets (although not in Chrome and Opera and
eventually other browsers, as unicode-range is more widely adopted.)

And having dropped the "Farsi" then "Film" as a family name doesn't
make so much sense :)

Ideally the name is a kind of made up Latin word that you could stake
a trademark claim on.

As an example (only! :) I spent a few minutes with Google Translate
and a transliterator, and "hero" in Farsi transliterated and mutilated
might be "Philwan" or "Kharman". Those would be short, simple,
memorable names that I'd like to see :)

On 6 January 2016 at 09:56, Borna Izadpanah <borna...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> The complete Arabic character set.
> Any final comment or feedback is highly appreciated.
>

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Cheers
Dave

[Borna Izadpanah]

Hi Dave,

I fully understand your concern. 

I actually have another suggestion. How about "Affiche"? This is French for "poster". 

It makes sense since those movie posters that inspired my typeface where also called Affiche in Iran. 

Surpassingly I couldn't find any typeface with this name. 

If you are happy with it I can buy a domain like (www.affichefont.com) and start working on it.

Cheers,

Borna

[Dave Crossland]

A strong contender! But, alas,
http://www.fontbros.com/families/affiche/styles/regular exists.

[Dave Crossland]

On 14 January 2016 at 10:11, Borna Izadpanah <borna...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> If you are happy with it I can buy a domain like (www.affichefont.com) and
> start working on it.

If you want to do this, Github Pages supports it,
https://help.github.com/articles/setting-up-a-custom-domain-with-github-pages/

[Borna Izadpanah]

I have changed the name FilmFarsi to "Lalezar" «لاله‌زار». 

There is a meaningful connection between Lalezar (which was the place to watch FilmFarsi movies) and my project which is concerned with popular culture.

"Lalezar" literally means "tulip garden".  

[Borna Izadpanah]

I thought it's time to have some fun!

[Dave Crossland]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNN1KmSH7Dk

[Juan Luis Blanco]

Congrats Borna! Awesome work! :-)

[Borna Izadpanah]

Thank you so much Juan! I'm really glad you like it. 

[Eduardo Rodríguez Tunni]

Beautiufl work!!

2016-01-16 8:23 GMT-03:00 Borna Izadpanah <borna...@googlemail.com>:

Thank you so much Juan! I'm really glad you like it. 

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[Borna Izadpanah]

Thank you Eduardo!

[Dave Crossland]

Hi Borna!

Thanks again for preparing this image. 

I wonder if you could please add this to the github along with the the source (.idml/.ai) files, and also for the Borna-Izadpanah_Film-Farsi-typeface_Intro.pdf ? :) 

On 15 January 2016 at 16:17, Borna Izadpanah <borna...@googlemail.com> wrote:

I thought it's time to have some fun!

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Cheers
Dave

[Borna Izadpanah]

Sure! I'll update the repository during the weekend. 

Cheers,

Borna

[behdad]

Chiming in.  While I love the new name, I disagree with your line of argument.  It's Latin focused for a project that is not.  The Latin in Film Farsi could simply not exist.  This whole idea that every typeface needs to have a Latin, and to go as far as changing the name to accommodate for the Latin being the default serving file, that's all just wrong and absurd.

My two cents.

On Thursday, January 14, 2016 at 3:21:54 PM UTC+1, Dave Crossland wrote:

Hi Borna

I would like to request changing the name from "Film Farsi" in the
final release, as I've understood this is a development name, and I
don't like to see script/language names in font family names. The
reason is that, by default in most browsers today, the Google Fonts
API will serve the western latin subset only, and web developers must
opt-in to other subsets (although not in Chrome and Opera and
eventually other browsers, as unicode-range is more widely adopted.)

And having dropped the "Farsi" then "Film" as a family name doesn't
make so much sense :)

Ideally the name is a kind of made up Latin word that you could stake
a trademark claim on.

As an example (only! :) I spent a few minutes with Google Translate
and a transliterator, and "hero" in Farsi transliterated and mutilated
might be "Philwan" or "Kharman". Those would be short, simple,
memorable names that I'd like to see :)


On 6 January 2016 at 09:56, Borna Izadpanah <borna...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> The complete Arabic character set.
> Any final comment or feedback is highly appreciated.
>
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[Borna Izadpanah]

As requested I have uploaded the specimen and source files on GitHub repository. 

[Borna Izadpanah]

Here is an article (in Persian) about Lalezar. May Google Translator make sense of it!

http://yaghout-art.ir/lalehzar-typeface/

[Dave Crossland]

On 25 January 2016 at 05:19, Borna Izadpanah <borna...@googlemail.com> wrote:

Here is an article (in Persian) about Lalezar. May Google Translator make sense of it!

http://yaghout-art.ir/lalehzar-typeface/

The remarkable point in the design of the typeface, is backed up. As noted, this type of support and client fees, the famous American company Google. Interestingly, the Google regardless of existing common policies, this work will be published by the Free. این توجه و بهای شرکت آمریکایی به احیای خط فارسی-عربی را می توان در کنار کم توجهی های مسئولان داخلی دید که با وجود حمایت های بی دریغ شرکت ها و موسسات خارجی، هنوز در حمایت هنرمندان و به خصوص در زمینه طراحی فونت و مدرن نمودن Persian-Arabic script and neglect are doubts.

haha, you'll need to help it with this paragraph :D 

[Borna Izadpanah]

Basically the author is criticising the local authorities of not investing on projects like this. 

“An interesting point about this typeface is the name of the investor. As mentioned earlier the famous American company Google has funded this project and regardless of all existing trends is going to release it as a libre font and for free. The attention and consideration of this American company can be compared to the ignorance of local authorities. Whilst overseas companies support the designers, particularly, in designing new typefaces and modernising the Perso-Arabic script the local authorities are hesitant and inattentive.” 

[Borna Izadpanah]

Hello everyone. 

I just did a pre-release for final testing. 

I'm now working on the web page to announce it. 

Cheers,

[Ali Akhavan]

HI Borna, 

I absolutely love your font! I am using it for writing film scripts and essays in Farsi. 

Thank you!