The Arabic Type Design Archive

Parnian Kashfi, a graduate of graphic design, designed the Parnian font as a student project at the Moslem Ibrahim Typography Workshop.

Amirarsalan Ahmadi is an Aerospace Engineering student at Sharif University of Technology. For the past few years, he has been studying and working in graphic design, with a particular focus on logo design. He has also gained experience in creating textual and visual content for both official and unofficial media platforms.

He is a Syrian-born type designer whose work bridges Arabic and Latin typography with a focus on legibility and wayfinding. He holds both an MA and a PhD in Typeface Design from the University of Reading, where his doctoral research examined the diversity of Arabic type styles and their influence on Arab readership. Before co-founding Foundry 5 in 2021, he expanded his MA graduation project Jali into a multilingual superfamily for Arabic, Latin, and Greek. His widely recognised typefaces include Jali, a humanist sans serif designed for multilingual signage, which received the Type Directors Club Certificate of Typographic Excellence and Granhan’s First Prize in the Arabic and Latin category (2019). At Foundry 5, he continues to develop typefaces for global contexts, uniting scripts across cultural and functional boundaries to set new standards for clarity and inclusivity in multilingual design. Mohamad’s work reflects a commitment to accessibility and cross-cultural communication, combining academic research with design practice. He has taught as Lecturer in Graphic Design at the University of Reading and as Associate Professor at the German University in Cairo, where he continues to contribute to design education alongside his professional and research practice.

Aida Sakkal specializes in all things technical and she is particularly interested in programming the artistic tendencies of beautifully hand-written calligraphy. With a B.S. degree in Computer Science from the University of Washington, her other primary interest is in developing tools to aid and automate the font creation process. Aida has been working with OpenType since 2001 and has played a role in the growth of OpenType and its application to Arabic fonts.

Born in 1947, Kameel Hawa is a Lebanese artist, painter, graphic designer, and writer. A graduate of the American University of Beirut and with no formal art education, Hawa began to paint intuitively in the 1970s. He was mostly inspired by daily life objects and domestic scenes, with seated women, friends, and acquaintances, flowers in vases, and birds on wires being his favorite subjects. In the preceding years, the focus of his daily work drove him away from painting as a central activity, though it remains, in his own words, ‘the paramount means of his artistic expression.’ His art, design, and writing have many common traits, the most evident of which is the ease of expression without compromising the profoundness of feeling and overwhelming passion.

A Netherlands-based type design company, recognised internationally as experts in multilingual typography and creating innovative font solutions for both global and local audiences.

Founded by Neil Summerour in 2000. A trained designer, lettering artist, and calligrapher, Summerour established Positype to accentuate the craft behind producing typefaces. The subtleties of mass, perfect imperfections, warmth, and uniqueness are foundational tenets to developing the foundry’s commercial offerings with the ultimate goal of producing useful and reliable fonts.

Protype is an independent type foundry and a place to explore beautifully typefaces that are made with love.

NaN is an exploratory and service-driven type design practice balancing weirdness and wisdom. Together with our wonderful rag-tag team of collaborators, clients and crew, we explore the relationship type has with code and technology – delivering projects with purpose. You can expect to find us at the intersection of serious and slap-happy.

Parachute® is a European type foundry and design agency founded in 2001, specializing in bespoke type design, corporate typefaces, and lettering for global brands.