Holy cow, I've returned! Sorry, blog readers! I've been in the middle of a big life transition that has taken all of my concentration and energy aaand also away on a 2-week trip to Japan to visit a dear friend who is studying Japanese!
WOW, Japan was very visually overwhelming! Especially for someone who wants to look at every bit of signage and printed matter in the country. I took about a year of Japanese way back when, so I was already familiar with
Hiragana and
Katakana, but had no knowledge of
Kanji. I think it was the first time I really thought about what an enormously difficult task Chinese type designers must have. I thought that nothing could be tougher than trying to fit in all of the dips and curves of
Sinhala - but I must say, imagine dealing with
this. And then try to use this popular Chinese search engine,
Shohu.
(here's an image, for those without Chinese language support) Wow. Welcome to the web for the rest of the world! It also reminded me of this post at the Ministry of Type on the difficulties of creating electronics interfaces due to the complexity of such characters.
Phew! Anyway, I could go on and on. But what I have been meaning to get to was that I found a few bits of Indic type while I was over there! So here they are! Some beautiful Bengali at an Indian restaurant, some Siddham script (Bonji in Japan) at a Buddhist temple, and what I believe to be Urdu, found at a park! So there you are! It's fun for me to see two different Asian scripts on one sign. It makes me giddy!
So once again, sorry for my extremely long absence. I hope to keep adding to this blog though, so don't give up on coming back! :)
Above, image from a Perso-Arabic workshop hosted by Erik Brandt and Leland Hill at my alma mater. Students photographed, drew, and manipulated characters to create some really interesting compositions! Check out the Geotypografika flickr set for more! I'm so very jealous.
I finally got around to reading the lovely diacritical mark article that our friend, Mr. David Březina wrote for i love typography! I don't know much about Arabic, but it definitely made me want to take another look at the decorative calligraphic work in which the *vocalization* marks are more obviously essential elements of the composition. After a very very quick Google search, I found this nice overview of the history of Arabic type evolution that looks promising. Hopefully it will help me dig further! Thank you, Pascal Zoghbi!
Holy cow, I've returned! Sorry, blog readers! I've been in the middle of a big life transition that has taken all of my concentration and energy aaand also away on a 2-week trip to Japan to visit a dear friend who is studying Japanese!
Just stumbled upon Calligraphy Islamic, which has lots of hidden gems! Above is an image from this interesting page, Muraqqa-e-Alif Laam Mim , which looks to be scans of a lettering guide by a calligrapher named Jacobus Michaeil. Also click on the Pakistani Calligraphers page for other interesting samples.
I tracked this seal down - and found a wealth of beautiful images. Check out the Royal Philatelic Society's page on the history of postage in the Jammu and Kashmir states of the British Raj. Geoffrey Hack's collection from the Princely States of India is also incredible! All sorts of beautiful old handwriting, seals, stamps, and printed type!
Cool image from the fun "Arabic Script" book by Gabriel Mandel Khan, a great resource for Arabic calligraphy noobs like myself. Hopefully someday I'll find some Nastaliq and other South Asian styles to compare!
Sorry to anyone who regularly stops here for the latest and greatest tidbits of Indic script goodness - I haven't posted in a while and have left you starving for type! (A week is a long time in internet-time.)
