Montalba-le-Château welcomed us with a warm and sunny weather. The castle looked like the right place to isolate ourselves from any distraction and to focus in our porjects. This has been probably the most intense and productive of our workshops. Four days of hard work resulted in the consolidation of the three projects, which was the main goal of this meeting. There is still a lot of work ahead but the main guidelines of our projects are already set. Qandus, Tubqal and Al-Zahra, the three type families, have completely different approaches and are devised for different purposes. Qandus is a display font based in the work of the Moroccan calligrapher Al-Qandusi. Tubqal is a rational sans for long texts based on the ...

Exquisite arabic calligraphy in the Alhambra. Just a tiny sample of the wonders one can find there. I think it is high time I updated the information about this wonderful and inspiring typographic experience. Since our first workshop in Marrakech last September, we have met two more times in Granada/Córdoba –in December— and recently in Montalba-le-Château, France. Our work in Granada and Cordoba was still rather exploratory. The main guidelines seemed to be defined but there was still the challenge of translating the findings and proposals of each alphabet into the the others while keeping each one's specificity. During this second workshop we spent a whole day visiting La Alhambra. With the help of renown professor of Islamic art José Miguel Puerta Vílchez we were ...