Words and Video by Jeff Kaiser

Most of us go through our days without thinking much about fonts, let alone agonizing about their every detail. But if we stop and look, we realize that they constantly surround us. Every label, every brand, every thing has a font. And, just like the images and graphics that grace these labels and brands, fonts are designed by the hands of artists. While the profession of font design is certainly obscure to some (though an entire movie has been produced on the topic), to those involved it is a passion, a calling, and – no doubt – a skill.

Last week a young German font designer (among other things) who goes by his “artist name” of Yanone, returned to Amman to speak about the font he designed for the city. As we learned from his presentation, the font is no ordinary typeface. Yanone designed for Amman a bilingual font – one font for both English and Arabic. But designing one font for two languages is no small feat. There are very few natural similarities between the Roman alphabet and the Arabic scrip, but Yanone designed small features that tie the two versions of the font together.

Before explaining the font, Yanone detailed the process of designing the font – no small task. He estimates that he spent some 3000 hours over the course of 10 months designing this particular font, which was also his graduation project from university. The font contains a number of special features: the first Arabic script to support fractions, the first Arabic script to support italics, both a Sans and a Serif version of the font in each language (for an explanation see this article), and more. According to Fontshop, the company that sells the font, “FF Amman is one of the largest bilingual families ever made, one of the few designed bilingually from scratch and the first containing true Arabic italics.”

For further reading on the font see here and here.

For highlights from the event see the video below.