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.
Comments
(sorry for so amateurishly butchering of the artwork)
Please note how different pieces of clothing are the same color.
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Also, sometimes a single Arabic letter intrudes deep into the drawing. Does this technique have a name?
The USSR had a sizable Muslim population so there are good Cyrillic pseudoarabic gems, but almost exclusively artwork for books, not fonts per se.
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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)
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/
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.
More illustrations can be found at http://www.xubing.com/en/work/details/197?classID=10&type=class
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.
A Bulgarian poster from the Soviet era for Princess Turandot by Carlo Gozzi.
Unfortunately I don't know who the author is.
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.