A process called “TrueType hinting” was employed to retain the original letter shapes. I am grateful to my colleague Thomas Grace, for his task was not enviable. It could be compared to drawing a beautiful and complex Arabic letter shape with subtle curves and details on the tiles of your bathroom. I am quite thrilled about the effect we were able to achieve: solid and clear letterforms in small sizes and well rendered, crisp and unique Arabic type in headlines.

Further technical work and testing had to be done for Nassim to be displayed in web browsers — webfonts are new, but Arabic webfonts were pretty much unheard of until now. Browser and cross-platform compatibility for anything more complex than ASCII proves to be still problematic. You can read more about the technical process and some of the challenges on my blog.

1 2 3 4