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TSHKEEL
Tshkeel is an educational system for young designers with little to no knowledge of the Arabic script, in hopes that it will spark wonder and drive to learn and create.
This system consists of a comprehensive guidebook, an app focused on building the typography design community, and typographic experimentation. Finally, in an effort to create a fun and tactile piece, I created an Arabic font to use on letter blocks. These blocks showcase all the forms of each letter, its English equivalence (if there is one), as well as a word and its translation.
A look at the history of Arabic typography and type design.
Long ago, the Arabic script existed with no diacritics. This created difficulty in pronunciation and the ability to decipher meaning. In Arabic, the meaning of a word can completely change with a diacritic, making diacritics essential when learning about both language and script.
For the most part, ligatures in Arabic tend to be stylistic. With the exception of one obligatory ligature.
The above spread shows a letter form on the right-hand side, accompanied by this letter's evolved forms throughout history on the facing page.
Each letter in the script can have up to four distinct forms.
Drawing from bilingual education, pictured here is a series of activities designed to help students better understand and practice how Arabic letterforms change depending on their location within a word
Gilbert Bold- Arabic Edition, created by myself and inspired by Gilbert Bold-Original Latin. Instead of trying to focus on making the Arabic edition anatomically identical to the Latin, I focused on capturing the same feel.
These letter blocks give users a tactile experience to better understand each letterform and its many forms or lack thereof. They also give users the ability to experiment with what they've learned and of course, practice!
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