Arabetics - A Rennaisance In Islamic Calligraphy

The work of Neville Brody and David Carson amongst others has placed typography at the heart of contemporary graphic design and this has very much penetrated mainstream design - from web sites, to packaging, print, and screen-based design.

Though Aerosolarabic and Dhikrullah have been bringing focus to contemporary Islamic arts, crafts and design, contemporary Islamic calligraphy has yet to experience the renaissance of typographic design that desktop publishing brought to Western and Roman fonts and typefaces. Arabic is indeed a very difficult language to learn - the complex, cursive glyph sequences are difficult to replicate in digital application design.

A few months ago Saad Abulhaab's work on Arabetics was profiled in the New York Times article An Effort to Make Arabic Easier. Abulhaab has patented a type style called 'Mutamathil', recreating Arabic type as a series of symmetrical and uniform glyphs. This allows text to be written in the traditional right-to-left style, but also in left-to-right forms for those more less accustomed to the language (for example European language speakers). Also, as each character is an individual non-cursive glyph, its form doesn't change with adjacent glyphs.

The forms and aesthetics of Mutamathil are perhaps the basis for broader exploration of type and calligraphy in contemporary Islamic design. The digital nature of Abulhaab's 'Arabetics', coupled with the traditional calligraphic forms of Islamic art, may harness the tools of digital design and typography in a new era of innovation in 'Islamic Graphic Design'...will we see a Muslim Brody or Carson emerge as Abulhaab's work proliferates?

Comments

[Imran Ali]

I forgot to mention...there are various PDF contact sheets for Mutamathil's Urdu, Arabic, Kurdish and Farsi variant available from http://arabetics.com...also the creator of the typefaces is allowing selected people to beta test the fonts.

[nasri abdallah]

je suis enchanté de votre connaissance,
pour l'intérêt de la calligraphie,
moi je suis un designer de font arabe
pour les affichages électronique
et typographique ma philosophie la simplification de l'écriture arabe depuis 1981, ma 1ère exposition à Alger.
merci si vous me contacter
je parle français, mon coeur musulman.
salut de Dieu miséricordieux
N.abh