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 mabsut variant of the Maghribi style of calligraphy. Al-Zahra is the most experimental and will play with the horizontal vs. vertical stress angles that make Latin and Arabic calligraphy so different.
Montalba said goodbye in a smoggy, opaque and mysterious atmosphere. What these three diverse projects will look like in our next workshop in Amsterdam remains also a mystery. We will have to wait to reveal it.
See also:
Typographic Matchmaking in the Maghrib (Marrakech)
Typographic Matchmaking in the Maghrib II (Granada-Córdoba)
Typographic Matchmaking in the Maghrib III (Montalba-le-Château)
Typographic Matchmaking in the Maghrib IV (Amsterdam)
