TYPE DESIGN
Created under the mentorship of Kamal Mansour of Monotype and in collaboration with Sheheryar Ahmed, this project attempts to offer some solutions in the digitization of Urdu fonts. It addresses the issues of stylistically referencing and maintaining Nastaliq’s distinct visual design on digital platforms, while strategically simplifying its architecture in order to be easier for designers to create many more Urdu fonts for popular use.The final result of the study is a publication discussing the history of Nastaliq, contemporary issues with its digitization, and detailed explanations of designed solutions.
This project endeavors to create a modern Urdu typeface that clarifies some of Nastaliq’s legibility issues while referencing some of its historical and quintessential style language. This was done by focusing on reduction of slanting and stacking of connecting letters, borrowing from the architecture of the Naskh script, reducing the large array of letterforms associated with each letter, and maintaining the angular pen strokes as well as other distinct visual qualities of the traditional Nastaliq script.
