Design concept

In Summer 2005, Typotheque was commissioned by Khatt foundation for Arabic Typography to develop a matching Arabic font for Fedra family. Peter Bilak with Tarek Atrissi began by collecting handwritten examples from different individuals from various areas in the Middle East, analyzing the forms and then comparing the visual rhythm of handwritten Latin and Arabic versus typeset Latin and Arabic. Based on these studies they created their own simplified skeletal shapes and proportions for the Arabic characters. Being a non-native, Bilak undertook a month long research in order to familiarize himself with the script and understand its structure and visual rhythm.

The characteristics that were carried over to the design of the Arabic version are mainly the proportions of the Latin: the baseline, ascender and descender, which were kept identical. On the other hand, two middle heights were defined, which are different than the x-height of the Latin font. Rather than directly bringing shapes from Latin, it was mainly the character of the curves that has been adopted for the Arabic counterpart. In Fedra, the curves start fairly flat and begin to turn relatively late, which creates a particular tension of shapes. The contrast between the thick and thin is maintained. This has allowed for keeping the same color in both the Latin and the Arabic text. Of course many things are not possible to translate from Latin to Arabic directly, so one has to be very sensitive not to impose the Latin structure on Arabic. The Arabic version uses the proportions and formal attributes of Fedra, but not its individual shapes. Because of the Semitic roots, the angle of the contrast is inverted, and what was the thickest horizontal in Latin, becomes the thickest vertical in Arabic. The same is true of the thinnest strokes, it is again rotated 90 degrees.

The idea was to create an original Arabic typeface that is not directly based on the calligraphic traditions, but one that takes into consideration the contemporary uses of Arabic type and that offers a pragmatic solution for multilingual typesetting. The simplified forms are stripped of all decoration while keeping the intrinsic structure of the Arabic writing system. Fedra Arabic is inspired by handwriting but combines the simplicity of written letterforms with the more traditionally used forms of printed book type. The intention was to create a new Arabic member of the Fedra font family that can accompany both the serif and the sans serif styles of the Fedra type family. Sans and serif style do not apply to the Arabic type tradition, and the only way to make Arabic compatible with serif typefaces is to increase the contrast of the stroke modulation. In the case of the Fedra, the serif version is low-contrast and so after testing, the Arabic font seemed to match both the serif and the sans serif.

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