What's in a Waw?

A progress of the waw form as it evolved from the beginning of the experimental design process to the final shape.

The Setup - Angle from Heaven

Ruq'ah, like many Arabic calligraphic styles, and unlike any of Latin, cascades. When starting a typographic adaption, the cascade angle is one of the most important considerations.

I should also add, a daunting one. The cascade angle is a seminal factor in the development of a Ruq’ah-based project because it will not only affect how the resulting typeface compares to the fluidity of calligraphy, but it will also influence other major considerations in the mechanics of the typeface, namely, the connectivity.

What's in a Beh

The visual progression of an isolated beh shape.

Gleaning Design

The visual direction of The Ruqah Project is a new one to construct for me: I haven’t worked on a type design project that directly derives its aesthetic from a specific source before.

My MATD project was nothing but an exercise in learning how to construct letters. As soon as I reached something that looked like a typographic ‘d’, for example, after a lot of copying and pasting and rotating, I was more or less done with that letter — save for applying few attributes to achieve at least some stylistic cohesion. The rest of the typeface design projects I’ve worked on as a freelancer had had their creative directions pre-determined, and I was only involved in expanding the character set and developing them into working fonts.