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The experiment with these design fonts made it easier to understand both the issues of balance in designing letters and the importance of shapes that can be easily read and joined in the mind when written in any convention – left-to-right, top down, and in circular, curved or angular grids. In the example seen in Figure 3, Ghalib’s following couplet is written in the Khat-e Paikan:Īs can be seen, the first letter of each word is enlarged and centralized, and the succeeding letters wrapped around it in the clockwise direction in a geometrical grid. The strong geometrical shapes of the letters in Khat-e Paikan made it more flexible for writing in different ways. As the letter shapes were triangular, resembling arrowheads, I named this new font Khat-e Paikan (Arrowhead Font) shown in Figure 2. But I was still not happy with how the letters looked arranged into words.Ī year later, in 2013, while discussing a joint design project with the fashion designer Sonya Battla, I designed a completely different non-cursive design font. Once again, I thought of the Khat-e Mahi and considered whether it could be employed for this purpose. For such a board game one needed a non-cursive, detached font, in order to have only one shape for each letter. Then in 2012 I thought about designing a Scrabble-like board game for the Urdu language to popularize its use among children. I left it where it was and nothing much happened on the design front for several years as I became occupied with my writing and translation work. However, as I began making words with the Khat-e Mahi, I realized that as a design font the roundness of the Khat-e Mahi letters did not give it the solidity of form that I wished. It would also allow for the integration of two or more words or lines of text even as they intersect each other. Once the integrity of the script was broken, the letters could be written not just right to left but also downwards, at an angle, in a circular formation, and across any grid, allowing written words to intersect and overlap where words can be formed. This final version materialized in a set of letters I named the Khat-e Mahi (Fish Font) whose rough drawings are reproduced in Figure 1. The first few letters came out in shapes resembling the form of fish, and as I liked their appearance, I consciously tried in the interests of uniformity to keep that as a design feature for the rest of the letters. Since the Urdu alphabet set contains the Persian and Arabic letter sets, it could be used for all three scripts. To explore the idea of a detached script, I made an attempt at designing new shapes for the letters of the Urdu alphabet, to be written non-cursively. The ligatures of the cursive scripts are an additional challenge in learning languages that use the Arabic script.
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Creating a non-cursive script is impossible without breaking the script’s integrity and doing away with the variant notations of each letter, which is why the calligraphers have not employed it as a system, although standalone letters are often used as design elements in calligraphic art.Ī non-cursive font would also make learning the Urdu, Persian and Arabic languages much simpler, as the majority of the world’s languages follow a non-cursive script. In all calligraphic fonts, the initial, medial, final and isolated forms of the letter have notations. History of Nastaliq and its inventor, the fourteenth century calligrapher Mir Ali Tabrizi, I realized how, despite the long tradition of abstraction in Arabic, Persian and Urdu calligraphic traditions, I had not come across examples where the letters of a word were written non-cursively – that is, detachedly – while retaining their connection as a word.