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What do designers need to know in order to work with both Latin and Arabic typography? Plenty.
For many reasons, the Western world has become aware of and, hopefully, more sensitive to Arabic culture. As a result, graphic communicators in the West are being asked to add insight into Arabic culture and graphic communication to their creative palettes. This, however, is clearly easier said than done. Creating design that will perform acceptably in the Arabic community takes a lot more than adding a new suite of fonts to your hard drive. It also takes the realization that the foundation of Arabic graphic communication is very different from that in the West, and designers must adjust accordingly.
ARABIC TYPOGRAPHY'S ROOTS
Arabic belongs to the group of Semitic languages and can be traced back to the Nabataean script, which dates from the third century. It was not until the seventh century, however, that the written word-and thus calligraphy-became important. Although the tribes of Arabia had a strong love of language, especially poetry, this was based on a verbal tradition passed from generation to generation.
At first, the written word was the province of few and culturally unimportant. The need to reconcile the contradiction between the Arab fascination with the beauty of the spoken word on the one hand, and the limitations of existing Arabic scripts on the other, played a positive role in the development of Arabic calligraphy as an art form (see fig. 1).
The word calligraphy comes from Greek and is a combination of two words-kallos, meaning "beauty," andgrapbia, meaning "writing." Arabic type design owes nearly everything to its heritage of calligraphy and has developed along totally different lines from Latin forms. Arabic typography, however, should not be confused with calligraphy, because even the best-controlled human hand does not write like a machine (fig. 2).
CONTEMPLATING ARABIC
The Arabic language is used in 23 countries and is spoken by nearly 300 million people. Advertisers contemplating translation into Arabic often ask whether Arabic is one language or several. While there are dialect differences between Arab states and between regions, in terms of the written word Arabic can be regarded as one language. All educated people throughout the Arab world readily understand the classical Arabic...