9/20/2023 0 Comments Fontlab going forward in historyThat this tailoring to specific audiences worked well is evident from the rampant pirating of the Persian BBC Nassim version for websites in Iran. In addition, the work with the teams of the BBC’s language services – Arabic, Persian, Pashto and Urdu – provided insights into the various cultural typographic preferences, contributing to the continued improvements of the design. Drawing from the approach I had learnt in the collaboration with DecoType, I rendered ligatures as contextual alternates to reduce the number of glyphs needed, and thus the size of the fonts. In the process of adapting it to the client’s specific requirements – technical for screen rendering and stylistic for culturally distinct audiences – Nassim evolved further. Coincidentally, Nassim became a protagonist in its early days, as it was selected by the BBC Worldservice for its Arabic-script news websites. Nassim was thus released with Tasmeem in the Middle Eastern version of Adobe InDesign extending the original design with numerous features and language support.īy 2010, technological changes and an entirely new area of typography opened up with the advent of web fonts. For example, ligatures are unnecessary in ACE fonts as the changing letterforms of different contexts are built dynamically from component parts – a more elegant and efficient approach to the typographic rendering of the Arabic script. Here, I had the interesting and sometimes challenging task to revise parts of the Arabic design to take advantage of DecoType’s Arabic Calligraphic Engine (ACE), an approach to Arabic type with fundamentally different concepts to those found in the OpenType world. In 2008 an opportunity arose to reconsider the design and concept of Nassim as DecoType and WinSoft sought new designs for their jointly developed Tasmeem software. Not only did it provide me with some distance, refreshing my critical eye, but also allowed my appreciation of Arabic type forms to mature further. As I studied Arabic in Syria in 2007 I pursued other projects and commissions and left the type to rest. The new version of Nassim is a major update, reflecting its use, technical changes and my learning.Īfter graduation, I didn’t immediately try to have Nassim published but it won a number of prestigious awards. Today, I am excited to announce the release of an updated and improved version of the typeface, Nassim 2.0. Ten years on, Nassim has established itself as a key exponent of a new generation of Arabic typeface design, a feat I would not have dreamed of back in my Reading days. I was a Master’s student at the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication at the University of Reading and in the final third of the practical programme, adding finishing (or so I thought) touches to the regular design and completing the family’s scope. On May 17, 2006, I was in the process of defining Arabic mark positions for Nassim in a roundabout process involving a dummy FontLab MultipleMaster file, custom export scripts and Microsoft’s beloved Visual OpenType Layout Tool – VOLT.
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