Please list your favorite foreign looking Latin fonts



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.
«1

Comments

  • Vasil StanevVasil Stanev Posts: 759
    edited April 2018

    (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?
  • Vasil StanevVasil Stanev Posts: 759
    edited April 2018
    (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.
  • Thank you for starting this thread!
  • The USSR had a sizable Muslim population so there are good Cyrillic pseudoarabic gems, but almost exclusively artwork for books, not fonts per se.

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


  • Thomas PhinneyThomas Phinney Posts: 2,732
    edited April 2022
    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 SavardJohn Savard Posts: 1,088
    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.
  • 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 PuckettJames Puckett Posts: 1,969
    edited April 2022
    Samarkan is my old favorite. It gets used a lot in India to advertise Indian classical music concerts.

  • James PuckettJames Puckett Posts: 1,969
    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 SavardJohn Savard Posts: 1,088
    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 PeaseK Pease Posts: 182
    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 StanevVasil Stanev Posts: 759
    edited April 2022
    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 PuckettJames Puckett Posts: 1,969
    And this just showed up in my LinkedIn feed.

  • Mark SimonsonMark Simonson Posts: 1,652
    Is that what I think it is? An actual devanagari font based on a fake davanagari font?
  • 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.

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



     
  • 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 PuckettJames Puckett Posts: 1,969
    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/
  • 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.
  • 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 EliasonCraig Eliason Posts: 1,397
    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 StanevVasil Stanev Posts: 759
    edited April 2022

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

  • Yes, Square Word Calligraphy was the inspiration for that project.
  • Vasil StanevVasil Stanev Posts: 759
    edited September 2022
    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.


  • 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.
Sign In or Register to comment.