Tags ArchivesTypography

It is a pleasure to help such hard-working students. Image: Brahim Boucheikha. It was a delightful feeling to go back to the IRCAM (The Royal Institute for the Amazigh Culture) to give this workshop about Tifinagh type design with Brahim Boucheikha. I still remember my research trip to Morocco in 2014, when I was working on my dissertation, and how I was welcomed and helped at the IRCAM. This time, I was really pleased to give back my knowledge about typography to five enthusiastic Moroccan students. The workshop took place from July 18th to 22nd. After an intense week we were able to present a bunch of new projects that will certainly enrich the typographic scene of the Tifinagh when they are eventually completed. The projects aim to ...

I was very pleased to talk about the Tifinagh script in the 7th International Conference of Typography in Valencia. This time the focus was in its cultural, social and political aspects. The standardization of the Amazigh language implied the choice of a script to write it. The election of the Tifinagh rather than the Arabic and the Latin was a controversial issue which, to some extent, remains nowadays. It illustrates visibly the political implications of a writing system in multilingual/multicultural environments. Other issues like the need to adapt an ancient alphabet to the new technologies, but above all, to the needs of a mostly Tifinagh-illiterate population in order to facilitate the learning and the use of the script in common life raised ...

It seems that the end of this year is going to be intense. I am really glad to announce my talk about the Tifinagh script in the Face Forward conference in Dublin. I'll talk about the normalisation and unification of the Amazigh language, as well as the renaissance and standardisation of its original script, the Tifinagh alphabet, in Morocco, where it coexists with the Arabic and the Latin scripts. The practice of typeface design in this peculiar context raises extremely interesting and uncommon questions, namely: Which are the criteria to define a unified and manageable character set from more than 20 dialects each one with diverse peculiarities and uses? How to translate the shapes of ancient carved letters into digital media? How ...