Post-Diplôme Amiens, class of 2011

Amiens, Picardie.
A year has passed again and a new class of post-diplôme students leaves the ESAD Amiens. On Wednesday, February 8, they presented the results of their roughly 16 months of research and design work to the jury consisting of the invited Dr Fiona Ross, Thomas Huot-Marchand and the school’s regular teachers. The biggest class of this course yet — with a record-striking 5 students — it has also been a delightfully diverse bunch. Chorong Kim (김초롱), Đam Ca Phạm, Ling Fan (范凌), Sarah Kremer and Sonia Da Rocha not only share strikingly different backgrounds, but also undertook projects of very heterogeneous characters. Their projects are on show in the school’s gallery until the 24th of February.

Photos kindly provided by Patrick Doan.

Chorong, 초롱, having already developed her interest in type during her studies in Besançon, embarked on a challenging project. Coming from Korea, multilingual publications were a known design-problem to her, and she decided to address it in her research. She singled out Thai — one of a number of scripts used in the country — as the centre of her interest for this project and went about developing a multi-script typeface family. With language studies, a trip to Bangkok and exchanges with experienced designers of Thai typefaces, Chorong went a long way to establish a solid foundation for a successful continuation of her interest.

Đam Ca, a student of the ESAD for a number of years, also related his project to his home Vietnam. The particularities of the language and their representation with the Latin script were at the heart of his questions. Inspired by work conducted by Patrick Doan during his studies, he set out to develop a typeface family that would lend itself better to the specific visual patterns the monosyllabic Vietnamese language creates. To make things more difficult, he set himself the task to apply the requirements one would find in a dictionary to his design, taking inspiration from established models. His dedication and passion to the subject suggest that before long Vietnamese publishing may have a typeface family available tailored to its language requirements.

Ling, 凌, set himself something of a daunting task by exploring novel means of designing Chinese type. His experiments involved a deconstruction of characters into small, repetitive elements, in some way inspired by and reminiscent of DecoType‘s approach to the Arabic script. He investigated in great detail how notions of typographic grey, rhythm and patterns translate to Chinese, and developed a range of experimental study fonts based on components to facilitate rapid testing. As this subject was a bit of a supervisor’s nightmare as it exceeded the competences of all ESAD teachers, his exchanges with designers knowledgeable in Chinese were crucial. His continuation along these lines will be interesting to follow.

Sarah set out with a similarly applied approach, her interest in type coming from publication design. She questioned common notions of typographic families, and developed a pairing of different styles in contrastive, rather than harmonious positions. The versions of her typeface were born from different letter-making processes — calligraphy, stencil cutting, and modular design — and she aspired to retain some of the specific aesthetics derived from them. With the advancement of the year her interest in other scripts was — to little surprise — awoken, and she developed Cyrillic companions for her Roman and Italic versions. Whilst still under development, they will complement nicely this ingenious family.

www.sarahkremer.com

Sonia’s training in calligraphy led her to develop an interest in the Arabic script and its rich world of letter-shapes. Yet, the source of inspiration for her project was not so much calligraphy as an artistic expression, but rather the fascinating world of manuscript production in which Arabic script flourishes not so much for its own sake, but as an information carrier. Inspired by treatises on medicine and astronomy, she started her studies and learning of the script. For her project, she attempted to keep the informal nature of the hands found in such manuscripts and develop a multi-script typeface with a friendly character.

My perspective as their teacher is undoubtedly biased, but no matter what will come of these projects in the long run, I would argue they exhibit a number of qualities. Their diversity of approach and form is the first characteristic I value. Rather than following any prescribed path, quite distinct ways were taken by each individual. Another shared feature is the strong influence of research on the design process, and a continuous reevaluation of assumptions. Many ideas assumed from the outset changed or got relativised by testing and discussing them. Though, arguably, this is a feature of any education worth being called by that name, it is gratifying to see it actually happen in practice.

In what form these projects will continue remains to be seen, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we were to hear more about them in the years to come. For the path onwards, I wish them the best of luck!

2011 and onwards

On Thursday, January 26, Typographica posted its most recent best-of-list of typeface releases for the year 2011. I am honoured that Nassim is included in this selection of excellent creations, and feel particularly humbled in view of some of the worthy honourable mentions. Thierry Blancpain’s review is enlightening and critical at once, succinct and without flourishes; a rewarding read for me. It follows Typefact’s selection of Aisha in their selection of the best releases of 2011, concluding a year of great personal reward. But beyond my personal satisfaction, it gives me an opportunity to look back and attempt — what must remain — a subjective review of the year.

Typographica’s selection summarises another year of bustling activity in a blossoming field, seemingly untouched by economic crises. Indeed, typeface design appears to become ever more popular and self-sufficient, spawning new foundries, independent designers, dedicated education courses and software developments for these increasing numbers of letter-form-fiddlers. The changing technical means for designers and foundries are indicative of increasing commercial opportunities. In the few years that I am active in this field, the hegemony of one tool, last updated during my studies in Reading, has been fundamentally challenged by a number of alternatives, most recently in the form of Robofont’s release in autumn.

Even in the slower-moving world of education, both public and private, the impact is felt. Type-design courses seem to be the thing to add to the curricula of graphic design schools and universities across the globe. Formal type education, not just some optional extra-curricular side-interest to a graphic design curriculum, seems to establish itself. Clearly, the jury is still out on their mid-term viability, and in particular that of its hundreds of yearly graduates too. How many type designers can make a living from as narrow and specialised a trade? Are these boom years that will see a noticeable deflation in some years to come?
If we look at submissions to Type Design competitions — and there a few now — we see rather startling numbers. And many of them, both selected and not, are quite good too. Though, one may add, many of them are quite similar to one another too.

The wealth of expression, of interpretation, of changing tasks and media, the increasing number of designers, educators, researchers and, last but not least clients, are all good things. They make for an innovative field, better graphic design, better typography, and a better world, it is hoped.

That the BBC Worldservice chose to go for as new a territory as webfonts for its Arabic-script sites is testimony to the potential of current developments. The launch of the Arabic site set in Nassim in January 2011 was a milestone for me; but it seems safe to assume that its pertinence might transpire beyond the immediacy of personal reward. Just to name one example: 12 months ago, Google’s Chrome browser did not render Arabic webfonts yet, but by the time the Persian site was launched in April, the application’s rules were changed to allow for inclusion of the necessary tables in the fonts — a small step for the Internet, but quite a step for Arabic typography. It is particularly significant because it stands for one of the first instances in which new technological developments are employed for a non-Latin script as they emerge, rather than with the lag of years or decades to Latin typography that used to be the norm in the past century. Indeed, I don’t know of any other website of the scale of traffic as the BBC news sites that employ this new means on as wide a scale. And concurrently, the technology allows for design choices that had been prohibited before — the typographic palette of the BBC’s GEL (Global Experience Language) was not translatable to Arabic system fonts.

The launch of Rosetta in 2011, a typefoundry dedicated to world scripts, falls neatly into a series of developments that promise further advances in the field. For example the Thuraya typeface, the graduation project of Kristyan Sarkis can be named as one of the rare experimental display typefaces that actually has an interesting approach and re-thinks conventions of Arabic type (and it was duly awarded a TDC medal last year). It is noteworthy, that contrary to many other current display faces, it strongly builds on historic models, from which it derives much of its interest. Similarly, the award Mirjam Somers received for her Nastaliq typeface at the Letter.2 competition underlines what might be the beginning of a wider appreciation of a current in non-Latin typeface design that so far remained outside of the limelight. This delay is not entirely surprising, as contrary to the more visible strands that promise the ‘new’ for its own sake, without much regard or understanding of the ‘old’, comprehension and recognition of such works requires an effort from the audience. It doesn’t suffice to read the sexy tagline that promises to reinvent the wheel, to assess the quality of something as complex as a typeface (be it Arabic or any other script). There is nothing to ‘demystify’ about Arabic typography, as is often claimed these days, but there is a need for solid explanations and informed decisions in typedesign, which in turn require thorough study and practice. As anywhere else, also in Arabic typedesign there is nothing like a free lunch.

The mainstream recognition of projects informed by historic research makes one hope that the level of discussion of Arabic typography gradually raises. It may hint at an increase in demand for more differentiated opinions and a more critical assessment of non-Latin typography on a wider scale. Often, it seemed, that new typefaces were praised for the mere fact of being not of the Latin script. With a more diverse field, and more diverse approaches, this may change.

Whether 2011 was a seminal year in this respect is to be seen, but certainly a number of events indicate a change of winds. That typefaces from the young foundry Rosetta were selected by three independent judges of the Typographica selection speaks for its catalogue. That they are all designed with non-Latin scripts in mind, speaks for itself.

Nassim among winners of ATypI’s Letter.2 competition

The Nassim typeface family has been awarded another design prize.

After receiving prior honours from the Type Directors Club and the European Design Awards in 2007, and the London-based Design Museum in 2008, Nassim features now among the 53 entries that have been selected for their design excellence by the ATypI jury, formed of prominent designers and consultants. The winners of the Letter.2 competition were chosen from a total of 561 submissions from across the globe. We are delighted to see Nassim among this crowd of excellent designs.

This prize for Nassim recognises its latest incarnation, the first release in the OpenType format through the Rosetta type foundry. This latest version benefited from the experience of designing dedicated version for the BBC Wordservice’s various language sites and is the first time Nassim is made available in a format compatible with a wide range of platforms and applications.

Rosetta is currently offering a special discount on its Arabic type range, an offer that ends on 5. November! (This is an edit to the prior date). Just use the following code to get 22% off your license purchase: 683e650a.

Nassim carries BBC Persian news

London: The BBC Persian website follows its Arabic sister site in choosing Nassim to deliver its news. It is thus the second World Service language site with a ‘complex script’ that implements the BBC’s new global visual language with its specific focus on typography as the primary design element.

An honourable role and a great responsibility

The choice of Nassim for this task is a great delight and honour for many reasons, but most importantly for the content Nassim gets to display.

The BBC Persian is an important voice in Iran, viewed, listened to and read by roughly 3.1 million Iranians a week through its numerous media platforms (2009 estimates, current figures might be higher)*. In February 2010 half a million visitors consulted the Persian website per week, with an impressive 7.2 million weekly page impressions; bbcpersian.com receives the highest amount of traffic of all World Service websites, and it is because of numbers like these and the specific role the service plays in Iran that Newsweek cites the BBC Persian as one of the “20 most powerful people in Iran”.

The Persian website played a particularly important role during Iran’s 2009 elections and the subsequent protests in the country. During election week, the site recorded a jump from 16 to almost 50 million page impressions, despite the Iranian government’s attempts at blocking the domain. According to the BBC World Service’s 2009/10 Annual Review (p.10), the following crisis defined a watershed moment for the service:

In the aftermath of Iran’s 2009 presidential election, BBC Persian was receiving up to eight user generated communications per minute. As videos, text messages and emails flooded in, the integrated news and information service became the focus for citizen journalism during the most serious crisis in the country since the 1979 revolution. BBC Persian gave Iranians a voice and a way of sharing information, as well as providing a source of fair and balanced news.

Carrying the news in Persian thus amounts to a big responsibility, and in order to fulfil this role appropriately, Nassim was revisited and modified to cater best to the specificities of Persian typographic customs. In close collaboration with the Persian language service, and with the support of my own historical research, I redesigned the most typically Persian letters. Based on archival sources at the University of Reading, I redrew Nassim in a more typically Iranian ‘flavour’ and adjusted the programming accordingly. The resulting version gives the website a distinctly Iranian look, whilst maintaining the coherence with the brand’s global visual language and the Arabic sister site.

The following image shows a selection of the most recognisable revisions of typeforms. In addition to substantial design modifications such as seen in the Keheh and Mim, I introduced a number of more subtle adjustments, such as the contextually sensitive dot positioning of initial Yeh and Peh, illustrated with the below graphic.

Type design at its most relevant

The active engagement of the Iranian audience with the channel, as well as the aggressive crackdown by the authorities on the BBC and international media in general, underline their importance in a country that is experiencing substantial political and societal upheavals. Provision of reliable, accurate and unbiased news is a global challenge — but its role in the Middle East is of epic proportions. The events of recent months redefined the region and gave ample proof of the power and importance of journalism and the free exchange of information. Whilst it is clear that the reasons that triggered the revolutions of the Middle East were manifold, it seems fair to say that the publication of information through Wikileaks, and the revived notion of citizen journalism in combination with the facilities of on-line social media, all supported and reinforced a public movement for change.

Mainstream news providers react and reposition themselves in view of these developments. Their roles change, and if the opportunity is embraced, the new situation ideally creates a dynamic symbiosis in which both spheres of information-supply complement each other.

For someone with a keen interest in the Middle East, these are exciting times of hope and potential. For me as a typographer, helping to bring news from a respectable source to the world is an important goal in the typographic profession. In my opinion, such contribution, as small as it might seem, is the most relevant typeface design can get, it is the moment at which the recurring question whether type design is able to make a difference most strikingly gets an answer. And thus, seeing the news of these last months, from Tunisia in December, to Tahrir in January, to Mubarak’s resignation on the 11th of February 2011 set in Nassim on the BBC Arabic website, made for the highlight in my professional career.

From today, Nassim will help to bring the news from Iran to Afghanistan, and in the hope that Nassim will fulfil its task well I send my warm regards to the 70 million Farsi readers worldwide.

—
* All figures of traffic and visitors are taken from the BBC World Service Annual Review 2009/10

Post-diplôme ESAD graduates and opens its doors

Amiens, Picardie.
On the 8th of February 2011, the latest post-diplôme of the ESAD in Amiens finished its one-year-and-a-bit long cycle of studies, practice and research.

Under the scrutiny of the invited external jurors Jo de Baerdemaeker and Olivier Nineuil, the two students Alisa Nowak and Damien Collot presented the results of their stay at the ESAD.

The two are the first students graduating from Amiens since my full involvement in the teaching at this school, and self-evidently this class has a particular personal meaning for me. But more than this, I would go as far as saying that the work they have produced under the combined supervision of my colleagues Patrick Doan, Sébastien Morlighem and myself is a promising starting point for their careers in type.

Eskapade by Alisa Nowak

Mingus by Damien Colot

Alisa and Damien both have shown ingenuity, curiosity, skill and perseverance in their respective approaches that created two very distinct, yet similarly qualitative projects. It makes me very happy and even a little proud to have played a role in their first serious steps in type design — and it would surprise me if they were the last thing we were going to see from them.

Good luck for the way ahead!

Coincidentally, the school is having its open days this very week, welcoming prospective students, curious guests, colleagues and friends to have a first-hand look at the work done at the ESAD Amiens. Les portes sont ouvertes du 11 à 12 mars, 10—19h, soyez le bienvenu.

The following images give some impressions from the jury meeting and shed a first glance at Alisa’s and Damien’s work, explained and illustrated in more detail in the below PDFs.

Alisa Nowak’s Eskapade specimen
Damien Colot’s Mingus specimen

BBC Arabic: Nassim sets news

London: Following the redesign of the mother-page of the BBC News in July last year, today the BBC Arabic launched their new website. It is probably one of the first, and certainly the biggest site yet to use webfonts – Arabic webfonts that is.

Typography as a defining element of the site

This is an exciting development as such — Arabic typography catching up with the latest technological developments — but I am particularly delighted and proud to say that the BBC design team chose my Nassim typeface to fulfil this role and serve as the main typeface throughout its Arabic news site. Nassim therefore becomes the first Arabic typeface that makes the leap to the Internet and facilitates what has long been impossible to achieve: distinguished Arabic web typography. I am humbled that Nassim becomes part of a project that aspires to become “the best digital media brand in the world”.

The path for the new concept and look was paved by the redesign of the whole BBC website with a focus on type as central element of the brand. In this compelling account by the makers you can read about the newly introduced grid-layout and how the concept of the new BBC design strongly emphasises the role typography plays on the site:

“A key feature of the new GVL (Global Visual Language) is a much more dramatic use of typography. As well as Gill Sans we’ve introduced big bold type in Helvetica or Arial and restricted variations in size so that we have much greater consistency across the site.”

The new design harmonises the many sub-entities and employs clear, sober, functional and aesthetically pleasing typography. That Nassim was chosen to perform such a prominent role in the design of the Arabic news service is of course a source of great satisfaction and achieves what I had aspired to in its creation: a typeface that delivers news to Arabic readers on a big scale.

A dedicated design

When I first designed Nassim, I drew inspiration from classics of Persian typography. Letters like the very round Mim echoed a style we are most familiar with from Iranian typography and graphic design. As the BBC team ran their first tests with Nassim, this particular flavour was soon discussed and I set out to develop a custom version more in line with the customs of Arabic type. The challenge in this endeavour was to come up with a solution that on one hand corresponded well with the BBC Arabic site, and on the other didn’t loose the distinct character that made Nassim win multiple design prizes.

In close collaboration with the designers and editors of the BBC World Service I revised a number of features and letters to accommodate for the style and specificities deemed most appropriate for the Arabic language website. The resulting BBC Nassim stays true to the qualities of the original design, whilst toning down some idiosyncrasies and giving it a generally more “Arabic” look.

Optimised screen rendering

A more technical challenge was to translate this new look to the final browser rendering of the font. The web is displayed on screens whose typical resolution (72 to 96 dpi) still is substantially lower than any conventional home-use Laserprinter (1200 dpi). This lower resolution results in uneven edges, visible pixels and/or blurriness of letterforms in small sizes. In order to reduce these effects as much as possible and retain the original letter shapes, a process called “TrueType hinting” had to be employed. I am grateful to my colleague Thomas Grace for his contribution on this level, 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. You can only choose between black and white, and you have only a handful of squares to represent a letter. This coarse approximation of the letter is then interpreted by a rasteriser (which varies depending on platform and browser) and taken out of your control. I am quite thrilled about the effect we were able to achieve nonetheless: solid and clear letterforms in small sizes and well rendered, crisp and unique Arabic type in headlines.

Challenges for Arabic typography on the web

More technical work and testing had to be done for Nassim to be displayed in your browser — 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. The problems we encountered range from the Apple OSX system that as of yet only partly, and insufficiently supports Arabic OpenType features, to Google’s Chrome browser that flatly rejects any fonts with elements that are fundamental for Arabic rendering or the Windows rendering engine that does not allow for Kerning between Arabic letters and punctuation marks. Unfortunately, the current situation does not allow for an equal user experience, and there are still a number of issues to be addressed. We hope that developers will soon catch-up with the demand for improved non-Latin typography on-line and off-line, and embrace the technical developments necessary for most non-Latin scripts.

One step ahead, but more to come

Maybe we can hope that this site is but a step that will trigger increased interest, development, more opportunities and investment in Arabic typography, irrespective of medium, language and country. Such developments would, in turn, be intricately linked to substantial changes in politics and societies – changes that recent events throughout the Maghrib and the Middle East give hope.

صبح الخير المغرب، صبح الخير الشّرق الأوسط!

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the BBC Future Media team for their excellent work, professionalism and friendliness, albeit the sometimes stressful and challenging task. My colleagues Thomas Grace and Tim Ahrens, whose technical expertise helped a great deal, and my publisher Rosetta whose logistical backing enabled me to concentrate on my design work.

Rosetta opens its gates

Today, on January 11, 2011, the new digital typefoundry Rosetta, dedicated to multilingual typography has launched its website.

Admitted, my personal view on Rosetta is slightly biased as they are going to distribute my typefaces Aisha and Nassim. Yet, I figure I had good reasons to choose collaborating with Rosetta in the first place, and I would hope these reasons might hold relevance beyond my own subjective assessment.

Whilst new foundries have been popping up quite frequently over the last few years, Rosetta’s specific focus on non-Latin scripts and its explicit goal “to support excellence in world script type design” make it quite a special addition to the field; indeed, one that appeared uniquely matching my own work and interests.

Rosetta couldn’t be more timely in its specialisation and the way it is organised. For one, it reflects the recently growing interest in non-Latin scripts in typography and addresses it in a dedicated and serious manner. It builds on substantial research in the field, sound craftsmanship and passion for exploration, and stays clear of the more populist and hollow claims for fame that can be heard occasionally.

Moreover, Rosetta’s setup as a network of independent specialists that contribute different sets of knowledge and experience follows developments we have seen in type design in general. The tasks at hand are constantly growing and hard to get by if one has to deal with each and every one oneself. More and more designers decide to form loose partnerships, rather than trying to tackle every aspect from PR to production themselves. One might be good at one thing, but not quite as efficient for another task. The move towards a loose division of labour therefore promises more satisfying results on all levels. Particularly in the development of non-Latin fonts which is constantly hampered by insufficient tools, bad software compliance and undocumented processes, sharing of knowledge and spreading of tasks helps to achieve higher quality products.

Run by professionals who have a keen interest in the subject matter and excellent knowledge of all aspects involved – including the appreciation of one’s own limits – and the right network of specialists to address the questions one doesn’t have the immediate answer to, I have no doubt that Rosetta will be met with appreciation from clients and colleagues alike.

Good luck for the exciting journey into the world’s scripts and languages!

ESAV Marrakesh, November 2010

My first visit for the academic year 2010-11 reconnects with the same bunch of students I taught earlier this year in March and May. On the first day the students, now in their third year (which also designates the third year of the graphic department of the ESAV) will continue to develop their skills and knowledge of Arabic script and typography by means of a series of exercises. This time around I conceived a number of tasks to train their dexterity and accuracy, in both, looking and drawing. The realisation that reading the script does not imply a profound knowledge of letter-forms surprises students time and again.

Day one aims at questioning the students’ assumptions about letter-shapes and earlier knowledge about the Arabic script. They are asked to complete a number of partly-hidden letters through free-hand drawing. The example letters are classic Naskh letters, using DecoType’s Tasmeem Naskh typeface. Through the process of copying/tracing/drawing, the students learn to appreciate the difficulty of proper contours, proportions and the relative positioning of letters.

Day two and things turn more complicated: how do you fuse individual letter-shapes? What are the alignments and how do individual letter shapes differ in context? Most students are surprised when realising that they didn’t quite know how to draw a letter, or indeed how the contextual shapes differ. While there is a fair bit of resistance, suffering and sighs, eventually most get somewhere, have moments of epiphany, and consequently satisfaction.

Day three: the students start to put their letters into context, choosing words and revising the individual shapes according to this application. More and more personal interpretation is introduced and the model is gradually less visible in the drawings. Questions of spacing and alignment turn more tangible for the students and coherence and rhythm are introduced as concepts. Later on, drawings get scanned and prepared for the next step, digitisation as vector graphics.

Day four starts with a scolding that reminds the students that work-ethic is not really compatible with constant YouTube video consumption and a gentle reminder that self-motivation and auto-critique are essential features for a successful designer. Some students must really think it is not their day as the realisation that the computer doesn’t help to hide a poor drawing kicks in. “Oh had I only made a greater effort with my paper drawing, the vector graphic doesn’t make it look any nicer” must have been on the mind of many a student this morning. Eventually some come to grips with the Bezier curves and a few nicely drawn letters make it into the classroom. Personal interpretations go further and wilder, in the best cases with some rather convincing results.

Day five and the work-ethics seems to prevail – or is it rather stress, anticipating the end of the course and grades looming? Either way, the students busily implement their drawings in final pieces with the aim of conveying the design process pursued. The class is split in “media design” and “graphic design” branches and accordingly letters are presented in static and moving images, according to students’ preferences.

Prologue: Although the students franticaly tried to finish in time, soon it became clear that only a handful would make it before the end of the course. The time lost during the first three days became graphically visible and I decided to give them extra time, rather than finishing with largely unsatisfying results. I hope the students will manage to motivate themselves, to be self-critical and eventually elevate their skills to a higher level of quality without external guidance and pressure.

Post Scriptum: As I left Morocco a little episode of applied type design sweetened the airport boredom. When the border guard checked the number stamped into my passport during my first visit, he clearly had a hard time deciphering the figures. The modern-face numbers hadn’t fully survived the stamping process and the official wasn’t quite sure what to note down. After a little back and forth, he was satisfied to have read the right figures, noted them in his paper, and used his ballpoint pen to correct the stamp in my passport.
I of course interpreted this as a first proof that the work at the ESAV lifted the typographic awareness of the whole country (and note the date when I left Morocco in May!).

Aisha nominated for the German Design Prize and a little website update

The nomination of Aisha for the Design Prize of the Federal Republic of Germany already dates back a few weeks, but I only lately decided not to participate in the final competition which delayed the announcement of her nomination.
Although I was slightly disappointed that some of the formalities of the competition did not allow me – albeit the nomination – to participate in this year’s contest, it still is a recognition of my work that brings a certain satisfaction. I am particularly happy that the steadily mounting interest in multilingual and Arabic typography is reflected in such a prestigious venue.
The announcement of this recognition on my website also gave me an opportunity to make a minor update. The section about my work with the Brill publishing house now contains images and a description of our latest joint venture, Letters of a Sufi Scholar by Samer Akkach, typeset by Thomas Milo and me.

ESAD Amiens calls for post-diplôme applications

The ésad in Amiens opens a new round of applications for the post-diplôme programme “typography and language”. In its 4th year, the programme takes a more explicit line with a clear focus on typeface design. Current student projects, ongoing research and staff specialisations supported this development. Small classes, international staff with a multidisciplinary outlook and substantial amounts of dedicated supervision time for post-diplôme students are strengths of the programme. And on top of it, there are no tuition fees.

Interested candidates are asked to provide a research project that outlines a preliminary direction for a personal project that is to be pursued throughout the year. Enquiries, applications and portfolios should be sent to director Barbara Dennys before September 13, 2010. The complete description can be downloaded here in French and English.