The Arabic Type Design Archive

Sahar Afshar is a British Iranian Partner & Designer at Dogray. She holds a PhD in Printing History from Birmingham City University, and is part of the Advisory Board of the Centre for Printing History and Culture in Birmingham, the Type Directors Club in New York, and the Beatrice Warde Scholarship. She divides her time between her practice as a type designer with over a decade of experience in working on various retail and custom fonts, and her research⁠—⁠investigating the technological, cultural, and political dimensions of typography and printing, and how these facets converge through various historical contexts. She is the Lead Instructor for Type West Online, helping students expand their creative potential to make their own typefaces.

Kourosh Beigpour is an award-winning graphic artist and designer originally from Kermanshah, Iran, now based in Los Angeles. His distinctive design approach fuses contemporary and traditional influences, earning him recognition worldwide, with his works being published in over 20 countries. Beigpour has collaborated with prestigious clients, including Google, The Broad, The J. Paul Getty Museum, UCI, UCLA, NEIU, OSU, Canada Type, the Powerhouse Museum, DoppelHouse Press, and The Samuel Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture. His work is also part of the permanent collection at LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art). He founded K-B Studio in 2011 and has recently completed a fellowship at Stanford University, where he focused on advanced research and projects in type design. Beigpour holds a BFA from Tehran University of Art and an MFA from Limkokwing University in Malaysia. He also graduated from Type West in San Francisco with a Postgraduate program in Type Design. Deeply influenced by his Kurdish heritage and mysticism, these cultural elements are integral to his design philosophy. Kourosh continues to innovate in typography, weaving spiritual and mystic influences into his creative work.

Omaima Dajani is a graphic and type designer from Jerusalem, specializing in Arabic script. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Visual Communication and a Diploma in Art and Design Education from Jerusalem, as well as a Master’s degree in Type Design from the Royal Academy of Art in the Netherlands. Omaima has collaborated with leading type foundries and is the award-winning designer of the typeface Lifta. She has also served as a judge in both local and international type and design competitions. With experience in teaching, she is also a lead researcher at the Arabic Design Archive (ADA) and the founder of Palestine Type Walks.

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.

Lebanese-Dutch Tarek Atrissi is one of the most recognized designers across the Arab world. He is the founder of Tarek Atrissi Design (www.atrissi.com), a design studio based in Barcelona and with offices in The Netherlands. The studio’s typographic and cross-cultural design approach has produced projects that have left a significant influence on the contemporary graphic design landscape in the Middle East, gaining Atrissi international recognition. Tarek Atrissi’s awards include the prestigious German Design Award, the D&AD Award, the Type Directors Club New York (TDC) Awards, the Adobe Design Achievement Awards, and the Brand Impact Awards, among others. He was listed in 2017 as one of the 100 most influential Lebanese professional figures around the globe. Early in his career, in 2005, he was selected for Print Magazine’s “Twenty under Thirty,” an international review of the most accomplished visual artists under the age of 30.

Lettersoup is an independent type foundry based in Berlin, Germany. It was founded by Botio Nikoltchev in 2014. The main focus of lettersoup is cooking fonts with Latin, Cyrillic, Greek and Arabic taste.

At Manchester Type, each project begins with research. Every typeface they develop is pushed along by passion and curiosity. Their fonts are often informed by the history of letterforms and always aimed at contributing to today’s type-culture.

Boharat is a type foundry that aims to introduce new flavors to the Arabic design scene. Boharat Cairo offers remarkable retail fonts, and accepts custom and bespoke fonts and typography related projects.

A global type design studio that offers high-quality typefaces for retail licensing and custom client projects.

29Letters Type Foundry S.L. [29LT] is dedicated to creating and publishing multiscript typefaces. Its Arabic and Latin typography leading edge arises from its collaborative team of professional Arab and European type designers crafting high-quality typefaces. Besides publishing unique retail fonts, 29LT frequently joins forces with renowned international branding, design, and advertising agencies to deliver high-end typographic solutions, such as bespoke fonts and wordmarks.