Lina Abdul Hadi is a Jordan-based graphic designer and type enthusiast, passionate about the communicative value of graphic design and its ability to convey meaning across diverse cultures, ideologies and media.
Throughout her career she has developed an interdisciplinary approach to graphic design, engaging in print and digital media, information architecture, applied to a diverse range of projects including branding, web and interactive design, wayfinding and system design, as well as layout and book design. A fascination with typography, calligraphy, and language, both Arabic and English, led her to London to undertake a degree in MA Contemporary Typographic Media at the London College of Communication in 2011, where she delved into the research of language and its visual manifestations.
Huda Smitshuijzen AbiFares: Can you introduce yourself briefly; what is your educational background, professional experience?
Lina Abdul Hadi: I graduated from AUB with a Bachelor of Graphic design in 2003. Straight out of college I joined the Jordan-based design firm SYNTAX and have been with them ever since. In 2011, however, I took a year off to pursue a masters degree in Contemporary Typographic Media (MACTM) at the London College of Communication.
HSA: When did you start being interested in Arabic type design? Was there any relation to the type of work you were doing in Amman, Jordan?
LAH: Bilingual type treatments are necessary in the Middle East. Although I have never had professional training in type design I often had to work on creating bilingual identities and layouts (mainly English and Arabic, occasionally with other languages). In the past we ran into difficulties due to the lack of variety in Arabic typefaces. Today the Arabic typographic scene has developed greatly, with many typefaces bearing bilingual versions. Still, there remains a gap within contemporary typographic endeavors to truly experiment and come up with new alternative solutions and typographic studies.
HSA: Why did you decide to pursue your postgraduate studies in London? How did you choose the program and your thesis topic?
LAH: The program I chose at the London College of Communication was the first of its kind, in fact it was the first year that it was offered. It is an experimental program that focused on type as manifestation of language. The course investigated language and the written word within typographic frameworks. Although it does not delve into the technicalities of typeface design, MACTM prompted us to challenge conventions and preconceived notions of typography.
My thesis topic stemmed from the frustration of an evident scarcity of experimentation in Arabic typography, and a desire to achieve a coherence within the Arabic and English language that would go beyond traditional equations of form and stroke. I researched origins and development of both languages. I looked at how Arabic and English, as well as other languages, deal with disparities between the phonetic and the written forms of language. This subject I found most interesting and a major differentiator between the Arabic and English languages.
HSA: Your Kufin (square kufi) typeface is a dual-script and bilingual font family. It is as far as I know a unique experiment, can you tell us more specifically about it.
1. What was the main idea behind this design?
LAH: The typeface was designed to be bilingual from the start, although I am still working on the Arabic version at the moment, as Arabic has infinitely more letter combinations and variables within letterforms. Square Kufi is an untapped lettering resource that remains relatively unexplored. The geometric forms of square Kufi, its strict grid and 1:1 ratio of black and white, reduces glyphs to their basic skeletal forms and allows for a closer relationship across languages in a way that is more intrinsic to the glyphs’ basic gestures. The name Kufin is an amalgamation of ‘Kufi’ and ‘Latin’ script, which is in essence exactly what the typeface is.
2. What inspired you to work on this topic?
LAH: This project is inspired by the power of language as dialogue: a courteous exchange, devoid of political agendas and misinformed preconceptions. It aims to scrutinize language at its most elementary level. It employs letterforms and basic linguistic structures as devices to investigate the merits of a script acquiring facets of another language. It aims to conduct a dialogue of cultures through the formal aspects of each language's respective script. The Arabic and English languages, and their contemporary scripts, are fundamentally divergent, despite the shared ancestor found in the Phoenician alphabet. Reconciliation of Arabic and English, both in content and in written form as typographic constituents on a page, has been a subject of interest (and frustration) for designers, copy writers and translators, mostly in the Arab regions and, more recently, for Western enterprises and projects that aim to reach an Arab audience. The project was to experiment with a new way of reconciling these scripts.
3. What are the main characteristics of Kufin?
LAH: Kufin consists of predesigned letter combinations and ligatures that are based on diphthongs, triphthongs, digraphs and trigraphs common to the English language. As a modern interpretation of Square Kufi, Kufin highlights the ‘wordgram’ as a central unit, made up of syllables and letter combinations as sub-units, rather than individual letters, much the same as the ligatured ‘wordgrams’ of Arabic. Kufin requires an alternative reading pattern, forcing the reader to acknowledge the modular constituents and word blocks. It highlights the tangible geometric construction of a word.
Read the full interview at Khatt
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