Typography Around the World: Arabic Palatino, Vodafone Hindi and Others

December 22 2009 — JA

I’m going to continue with my novice fascination with all things type, this time with a quick look at the process of adapting fonts originally designed in English to other languages and alphabets. Again, the wonderful i love typography blog drew my attention to this through a post by Nadine Chahine, who works for Linotype GmbH, on the release of their Neue Helvetica Arabic typeface.

Fonts such as Palatino, Helvetica and co are used all over the world and naturally one upshot of this is the need to transform them to suit languages such as Greek, Japanese, Chinese, Cyrillic and so on, not only for general use but also with regard to branding or businesses, where there is a certain desire to ensure consistency.

Chahine has been working with the Linotype foundry for years doing just this. On her blog, Arabic Type, she writes that while ‘Arabic calligraphy is beautiful, diverse, and often simply breath-taking’, its typography is still very rudimentary. Through her work, she is trying to remedy this. But there’s also another interesting thing that comes through here – namely the delicate interplay between culture and history through the symbolism behind language and design. When adapting Helvetica, a font commonly associated with cosmopolitan simplicity, Chahine wrote:

Is it possible to bring Swiss neutrality into the Middle East? Peace and prosperity? The inspiration for Neue Helvetica Arabic does not come from type specimens or calligraphy books, but from the reality of life in Lebanon. This is a typeface for hard-working and motivated professionals. This is the only way forward.

image from i love typography

Over the years, she has also created Frutiger Arabic and Palatino Arabic (which won a TDC Award in 2008). Naturally, the difficulty with adapting typefaces to other alphabets is the need to keep the spirit and feel of the style so that it will match with any accompanying English text, while still being true to the logic and legibility of the writing. Chahine worked for almost three years with renowned typographer Professor Hermann Zapf to perfect the font.

Palatino Arabic was one of the most difficult projects that I ever worked on. This is mainly because there are rarely any straight lines to be seen. This makes the outlines more difficult to draw, and the character joins more tricky. Point placement was an issue, since we needed to make sure that all characters appear as if part of the same stroke irrespective of the combination… At some point it became obvious that we needed a lot of ligatures. Usually, I’m not a ligature fan but Palatino Arabic needed to have them and so I started expanding on the existing design.

image from Arabic Type

Another example of this from TDC is Vodafone Hindi, a font designed by Dalton Maag for the launch of the Vodafone brand in India. The company had to create the Devanagari equivalent to other Vodafone lettering already designed in Latin, Greek and Cyrillic.

image from TDC