Intro to Type Design: Latin extended, Arabic, Bengali
Yaprak Buse Çağlar, Sina Fakour, Arnab Chakraborty
This tutorial looks at how source material gets read and reinterpreted as type, and how that process changes from one script to the next. Latin Extended, Arabic, and Bengali anchor the three case studies, each selected for the distinct set of design choices it demands of the type designer. Attendees will build foundational type design skills and get hands-on practice drawing letterforms straight from source material in each script. Latin letterforms carry centuries of stylistic change and technological influence, reaching well beyond the base alphabet into a wide range of diacritics and modified forms. Reading them accurately takes more than recognizing basic shapes — proportion, contrast, rhythm, and construction all shift in subtle ways from one source to the next. Diacritics in Latin Extended add their own layer of difficulty, each accent needing careful attention to size, placement, and weight relative to the base letter. The printed letterforms of Bengali remain less standardised, long confined to a narrow model shaped by the constraints of delocalised technology and the influence of Latin typography — at odds with the rich diversity of its written and vernacular forms. Newer technologies now invite a reconsideration of these norms: an opportunity to reinterpret proportion, contrast, rhythm, and construction in Bengali in its own right. Through the centuries, Arabic script has gone through different phases of adaptation and simplification in the process of typemaking, most of them due to technological limitations or the influence of Latin type-making logics. Today, with the advancements in OpenType, reviving some of the dynamism found in calligraphy and manuscripts can be made possible again.