Zoghbi spent the next six years working as a freelance type designer producing custom fonts for various customers that ranged from museums and cultural institutions to commercial clients. Building on the work that began in Massira, they sought to harmonize Seria’s treatment of strokes with the conventional proportions and structures of Arabic characters. Right after his graduation he was invited to participate in the Khatt Foundation’s first Arabic type design research project, Typographic Matchmaking, which paired him with Martin Majoor to create an Arabic complement to Majoor’s Seria. The design was Zoghbi’s form of activism the project consolidated his belief that letterforms can express a clear message and that “letters can start a revolution or stem from it, speak out the suffering and struggle of a nation.” Massira marked the beginning of his journey (or massira in Arabic) into designing Arabic fonts that are visually expressive, exploring various techniques and tools of writing (pen, spray paint, brush, lipstick…) and creating unexpected font families. For his final project he designed the Massira font family based on the Ruqaa style used for informal writing on demonstration banners and petitions in Beirut at the time. Since there was no such course available in Lebanon, he enrolled in the Type & Media masters program at the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague (KABK), graduating in 2006. Zoghbi felt the need to further develop his type design skills professionally. These courses sowed the seeds for his later professional aspirations, and he continued reading on the subject and practicing Arabic calligraphy with the help of existing workbooks. Zoghbi was intrigued by the idea of modernizing the script and his curiosity was amplified after attending an Arabic language course with the progressive Lebanese poet and philosopher Saïd Akl who spoke about his attempts at revolutionizing vernacular Lebanese and developing a “Lebanese alphabet” for it. The course included field trips to 18th century printing presses in Lebanon and introduced him to the Arabic reform projects in Cairo in the 1930s and 1950s, namely the work of Lebanese designer Nasri Khattar and his invention of the Unified Arabic Alphabet. Zoghbi began his professional education in graphic design at Notre Dame University in Lebanon and developed his interest in Arabic type design in the typography course there. The fact that he grew up in largely bilingual Lebanese society perhaps explains his natural inclination to establish a type design foundry that specializes in multiscript typeface design using Arabic as a springboard for developing multiscript font families. Arabic, though not a minority script, had been up to that point relatively underdeveloped compared to Latin and other scripts with comparable usage, which motivated him to explore designing contemporary Arabic fonts. It was founded by Lebanese type designer Pascal Zoghbi in 2013. The 29Letters Type Foundry was named after the 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet (plus the hamza glottal stop). Published in November 09 2020.Ģ9LT: The Arabic Script as Springboard for Multiscript Families Article by Huda Smitshuijzen Abifares for the Fontstand News Platform.
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