Creative Arabic Calligraphy: Designing the Letters.

We learned the anatomy of the letterforms of Arabic Calligraphy Design, and how they relate to each other. We also learned how to proportion and space a script harmoniously and in a way that respects the hierarchy of letters. Now we're going to use all this to design a script. The Interrelationship of Letters as a Design Basis, As a warm-up exercise, here are two sets of letters, from Early and Eastern Kufic respectively, with some blanks. Your task is to draw the missing letters, inferring their shape from the other letters, as they are made up of parts that can be found in them. Refer to the chapter on Anatomy of the Letterforms for the specific parts making up each letter if you need a refresher. This is a practical reminder of how interrelated the letterforms are. The building blocks of the alphabet, the bodies and tails, are few in number, and in theory it's enough to design them to have the full alphabet. In practice, I don't recommend working on them as disembodied parts. What we can do instead is work on a core group of letters that together contain all of these building blocks. You can see all the things inside Arabic Calligraphy Design.

Although it looks as if we are designing a typographic font, we are only overlapping with that process as far as our Arabic Calligraphy Design needs go. Typography and calligraphy overlap, but neither contains the other, as their goals and media differ. Typography is concerned with large amounts of text, mechanically (or digitally) reproduced, that needs to be highly legible as well as attractive; it requires great visual and technical expertise. If we were creating a font, we would have to anticipate and design hundreds of character combinations, so as to create a system that would look good in shape and spacing when used at any size, by anybody. Really good fonts take years to create, but are still limited somewhere, as improvisation is not part of their nature (and is irrelevant to their purpose). In contrast, a calligrapher's set, such as we're creating, can be this simple because we can adjust and improvise on the spot, according to our specific uses, and not worry about planning for every possibility at its inception. The set can evolve with time, and we can break our own rules in places. It can be said, therefore, that the significant aspects of a set of letters created for calligraphic purposes are: They can be loosely created, to be solidified according to context (something that can only be achieved in a limited way, and with great difficulty, in typographic fonts).

They must be easy to reproduce by hand (a concern that doesn't exist in typography, which is by definition for reproduction not-by-hand). With increasing skill, this becomes less and less of a limitation, but the beginner will find that working with a grid and clear geometric shapes is the best way to achieve this. The set shouldn't be boring! This may be the trickiest part. We design with consistency in mind, but this can fall into repetition. When these letters are strung together into words and sentences, will the result be musical or mechanical?

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