Please list your favorite foreign looking Latin fonts

Vasil Stanev

I have a soft spot for pseudoarabic fonts and am wondering: what are your personal favorites for Tibetan, Hebrew, Japanese etc. non-Latin fonts, and do you consider that they have a good market niche.

2. I am also going to shoehorn a question that is not typographic, but we are a fairly educated bunch: I read a brief footnote somewhere that, in Muslim miniature, there is some kind of rhyming of colors, e.g. the color of the shirt of one person in the miniature is mirrored in another one's trouser or the like, and if you connect all such binomes in the picture the lines pass more or less trough a single point or object, for example a carpet that has all the mentioned colors. Does anybody have more information on the matter in a language that is not Arabic? I have literally hurt my head looking for information.

Vasil Stanev

(sorry for so amateurishly butchering of the artwork)
Please note how different pieces of clothing are the same color.
____________________________
Also, sometimes a single Arabic letter intrudes deep into the drawing. Does this technique have a name?

Alex Visi

http://letters.temporarystate.net/entry/1/

Vasil Stanev

(Edited) Maybe I should clarify: I am looking for a list of names of Latin fonts that imitate what are over here qualified as "exotic" scripts, this means almost everything besides Latin, Cyrillic and Greek. The DaFont category is "Foreign look". Lao, Hiragana, Katakana, kanji, Hebrew, Arabic, and so on. There are plenty of bad examples around, but I would like to see the good ones - and the pros in a type forum could give the best!

The USSR had a sizable Muslim population so there are good Cyrillic pseudoarabic gems, but almost exclusively artwork for books, not fonts per se.

Nick Shinn

An image search for “chop suey font” will deliver many!

**

I’ve always liked Ernst Schneidler’s Legende of 1937, perhaps because it is more connotative than denotative… subtle and evocative, rather than hitting one over the head.
(Image swiped from Luc Devroye)

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

Thank you for starting this thread!

Vasil Stanev

The USSR had a sizable Muslim population so there are good Cyrillic pseudoarabic gems, but almost exclusively artwork for books, not fonts per se.

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

This one is most probably a font:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/48413419@N00/266618453/in/album-72157627127732939/

And do check out this group:
https://www.flickr.com/groups/cross-script-letterforms/

Vasil Stanev

Hey hey!  This is a little pseudo-Thai I did.

Thomas Phinney

Although there are a few gems (omg Legende!), I really dislike most exemplars of this category. Many of them remind me of Mickey Rooney’s portrayal of Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s; over-the-top caricatures of one culture, done by people from other cultures.

John Savard

And :I've noted that these days, many people are concerned that such typefaces are considered unfashionable, and instead will turn to the best-known alternative similar to Legende - the overused Papyrus.

André G. Isaak

I've always been confused by the association between Legende and things Arabian. It's a beautiful typeface, but there's very little about it that suggests anything to do with the Arab world in my mind.

James Puckett

Samarkan is my old favorite. It gets used a lot in India to advertise Indian classical music concerts.

James Puckett

André G. Isaak said:

I've always been confused by the association between Legende and things Arabian. It's a beautiful typeface, but there's very little about it that suggests anything to do with the Arab world in my mind.

I’ve always wondered that, too. It’s inexplicable, but it just works.

John Savard

James Puckett said:

André G. Isaak said:

I've always been confused by the association between Legende and things Arabian. It's a beautiful typeface, but there's very little about it that suggests anything to do with the Arab world in my mind.

I’ve always wondered that, too. It’s inexplicable, but it just works.

The trouble is that you know too much about type, and recognize it as an example of the French Civilite style. The lower-case shares some characteristic curves with a common form of Arabic writing, enough to suggest it to people's minds.

K Pease

Associations build from usage, and usage is often the nearest handy choice. Papyrus is used for Ancient Egypt themes almost solely because of its name. It was this that prompted me to design Walklike, styled on hieroglyphs and pyramids.

Vasil Stanev

Many people use such fonts when they like something to look "fancy" or "exotic", with varied success. It's like a leopard pattern, some say it looks good only on a leopard, others disagree. You can recontextualize the design in a very original way, however. This here remains one of my all-time favorite book covers. Does the font fit? I think yes. Is it perioid for the Bronze age and for the 1940's at the same time? The idea behind the book is to show what drives man to wage war and what the consequences of wrath are, so the font fits for me, because war is as constant as the font is classic. If it was set in a  font in the style of Liner-A, I think it would look absurd.

James Puckett

And this just showed up in my LinkedIn feed.

Mark Simonson

Is that what I think it is? An actual devanagari font based on a fake davanagari font?

Matthijs Herzberg

On the subject of Devanagari-inspired Latin type, I love Yatra One. I've been messing around with a 135° nib roman for a long time, always with terrible results. This take feels very clean and natural. Probably fair to say that it isn't so much meant to look like faux-Devanagari, but the two scripts harmonize impeccably within the typeface. It's also refreshing to see Latin bend its own rules to follow another script, rather than vice versa.

Helmut Wollmersdorfer

This uses the triangles of Cuneiform (part of a logo ~1800):



 

Helmut Wollmersdorfer

Some years ago a font of a young designer got awarded. Don't remember the name. She maybe had a similar idea independently or was influenced. It's Latin and an extreme variation of Carolingian minuscle only used for diplomata (formal documents between the pope and kings or emperors). 

James Puckett

Mark Simonson said:

Is that what I think it is? An actual devanagari font based on a fake davanagari font?

I think so. Here’s a link to the original post: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6919669075765866497/

Christian Thalmann

I made a faux Arabic font back in my absolutely ignorant (pre-Typophile) early days of font design. Don't google it, I'm mortified by its existence. I also obviously didn't know the first thing about Arabic script.

I also briefly experimented with a Han-style Latin that I was going to compose into syllable blocks some eight years ago. Luckily, I was quickly talked out of it here on TypeDrawers. However, it prompted me to have a look at what brush strokes look like, and I found that quite enlightening, as someone who's never practiced brush lettering or calligraphy.

I have fond memories of Samarkand, somehow it strikes me as more respectful of its subject matter than the Chop Suey fonts.

Florian Pircher

This reminds me of Square Word Calligraphy by Xu Bing.



More illustrations can be found at http://www.xubing.com/en/work/details/197?classID=10&type=class

Craig Eliason

I'm in the midst of a sizable research project on Auriol. It was developed in the context of a late-19th-c. Parisian fascination with Japanese visual culture, and its "brushy" strokes and gaps might evoke Far Eastern calligraphy to some extent, but to my eye it has little of the parodic and now embarrassing approach of the "Chop Suey" tradition. 

On another note, it's kind of interesting that the two uses of my Ambicase Modern font on fontsinuse are for an Arabic-calligraphy home goods site and an article about Dubai. Arabic forms had zero to do with the design, but the "foreignness" of its forms (resulting from its concept of combining cases) somehow evokes that region I guess.

Vasil Stanev

Christian Thalmann said:

Spotted this in my vicinity. Anyonе know the name of the font?

Christian Thalmann

Yes, Square Word Calligraphy was the inspiration for that project.

Vasil Stanev

I was doing a little autumn cleaning of my computer and came across this gem:
A Bulgarian poster from the Soviet era for Princess Turandot by Carlo Gozzi.
Unfortunately I don't know who the author is.

Claudio Piccinini

Thomas Phinney said:

Although there are a few gems (omg Legende!), I really dislike most exemplars of this category. Many of them remind me of Mickey Rooney’s portrayal of Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s; over-the-top caricatures of one culture, done by people from other cultures.

Agreed, I used to love them as a child and teenager but then I realized that unless they are done with great insight and thoughtfulness they often look bad, or at least caricatural.

Ray Larabie

If you’re considering using one of these typefaces, you should check to see if the result will be legible by readers familiar with the writing system being parodied. In 1998, a decade before I moved to Japan, I made an experimental typeface based on katakana and kanji forms which were manipulated to form a Latin alphabet. In the autumn of 2015, someone in Japan posted an image using that font which said, in English, CAN YOU READ THIS? It went viral, Yahoo! Japan picked up the story and it made the front page. I was contacted by several television stations that week to talk about it. These shows conducted on-the-street interviews with foreigners who had no trouble reading words written in this font, but most Japanese people couldn’t read it. I don’t mean they had trouble reading it—I mean they couldn’t read it at all. Their knowledge of the characters which the letters were based on completely overrode their ability to make out the Latin (romaji) forms. A few national variety shows did segments on my font. I did lots of interviews that week, with my wife translating since none of the showrunners or ADs could speak English. Interest died down until last year when I was contacted by a showrunner for a new celebrity quiz show. They wanted me to create sample words of varying difficulty on A4 sheets. I made a lot of them and tested on my accountant. He could figure them all out although some of them took a while to decode. They were all common English words that most Japanese people would be easily be able to figure out in a normal Latin font. They recorded the show in front of an audience, but my segment never made it to air. Not a single one of the celebrities could even read the word HELLO and they had 3 minutes to work it out. My accountant was pleased when I informed him that he’s a genius. I think this sort of idea can be an amusing experiment but make sure you add a warning about possible illegibility in your description. I also include warnings about not perpetuating cultural stereotypes. I have a Brazilian friend in Japan who was using a mix of pseudo-Devanagari and pseudo-Arabic for belly dance flyers, and I explained why this was cringe. She just thought they were belly dance fonts and had no knowledge of which writing systems they were parodying. She doesn’t choose those types of fonts anymore and her image is the better for it.