First, the important information…Nori is a hand-lettered typeface that contains over 1100 glyphs, 250 ligatures, 487 alternate characters, 125+ swash and titling alternates, lining and old style numerals. To make sure it is perfectly clear—Nori is the result of brush and ink on paper. The textures produced in each glyph are real and the imperfections are intentional and add to the sincerity of the letters. I say this to be as blunt as possible in order to avoid confusion and to frame what this typeface represents—calligraphic, handwritten letters captured digitally for their warmth and poetic variation for print and screen. Like my handwritten, calligraphic or brush-driven faces before it (the Baka series and the TDC2 2010 winning typeface, Fugu), Nori is a product of my analog and digital hand. To view the words and sentences formed by this typeface is to look at how my hands, yes hands, make letters. The fluidity, as well as the irregularity, is human, honest and intentional—to do so lets the brush I am holding breathe life into each letter. Once digital, any number of points and repetitive processes can’t mask its influences—and I like that. The brush, a simple instrument, my tool, my friend designed to emulate traditional Japanese sumi-e brushes... the Pilot Japan Kanji Fude brush pen. Each letter, each variation was written over and over again until I found the right combination. From there, each was scanned, digitized and optimized. Points were removed in order to ‘clean’ the glyphs up some but I did not want to compromise the integrity of the actual brush stroke. Once this base set of characters (about 350) were completed, the thoughtful manipulation of the glyphs, their gestures and forms were further expanded to solidify the embellishments used within the ligatures, alternates, swashes and additional features. This process was admittedly self-indulgent to an extent. I wanted the words created with this typeface to have the flexibility of variation and cohesiveness of movement that someone fluidly producing these letters by hand might have.  I hope you enjoy this typeface as much as I did during the six months working on it. A specimen and style guide is included with the purchased of Nori.

Hazim is a display font designed with isolated letters. It uses thin white slits positioned within extra bold black space glyphs emphasizing the main visual characteristics of the Arabetic letters in two positions: initial/medial and final/isolated. The spacing widths between glyphs match that of the slits to give a virtual cursive look and feel. The name Hazim was chosen to honor a friend of the designer, Hazim al-Khafaji. Hazim supports all Arabetic scripts covered by Unicode 6.1, and the latest Arabic Supplement and Extended-A Unicode blocks, including support for Quranic texts. It comes with one weight and a left-slanted “italic”. The script design of this font family follows the Arabetics Mutamathil Taqlidi style and utilizes varying x-heights. The Mutamathil Taqlidi type style uses one glyph per every basic Arabic Unicode character or letter, as defined by the Unicode Standards, and one additional final form glyph, for each freely-connecting letter in an Arabic text. Hazim includes the required Lam-Alif ligatures in addition to all vowel diacritic ligatures. Hazims’s soft-vowel diacritic marks (harakat) are only selectively positioned with most of them appearing on similar lower or upper positions to make sure they do not interfere with the letters. Kashida is enabled.

Ahmed is a modern Arabic headline face, first produced by Linotype-Hell Ltd. in the early 1980s. Originally developed as a simplified face, its design recalls the inscriptional and decorative tile work lettering of the medieval period. The strong treatment of the tails of certain characters departs from the more traditional style of tapering these finials, introducing a modern feel to the design. The contrasting proportions of the tall vertical strokes and the rather elongated counters lend a monumental look to Ahmed, allowing its effective use in titling. During the later 1980s Ahmed was developed into a traditional typeface, with the introduction of medial forms to improve character spacing and balance. Recently, Ahmed has been converted into the OpenType font format, ensuring its continued popularity as a heading face for newspaper typesetting. The Ahmed typeface contains two weights, Ahmed and Ahmed Outline. Both of the OpenType fonts include Latin glyphs from Clearface Gothic Roman inside the font files, allowing a single font to set text in both most Western European and Arabic languages. The two Ahmed fonts include the Basic Latin character set and the Arabic character set, which supports Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. They include tabular and proportional Arabic, Persian, and Urdu numerals, as well as a set of tabular European (Latin) numerals.