About
Blaka is an experimental typeface, enriching the gothic feeling of Black Letters by enhancing the geometric features to create midgrounds with the Kufic style for the Arabic letterforms.
The aesthetical matching process between the two scripts relies on the features of being hand-drawn with a reed pen. While Latin letterforms maintain sharp edges, Arabic relies on sharp edges and thick strokes to create overlaps to replace a usual baseline in most letterforms, giving the Arabic letterforms contemporary features.
The font family comes in two styles, Blaka and Blaka Hollow, featuring an outlined version of the font. Blaka also comes in two variants, the usual monochrome variants as well as an Ink variant Blaka Ink. The Ink variant are color fonts where the colors are defined by the font itself. Support for color fonts is currently limited to few applications like Google Chrome (version 98 or later).
To contribute, see github.com/Gue3bara/Blaka.
Designer
1Mohamed Gaber (Cairo, 1986) is a type designer and artist based in Amsterdam. His primary interest lies in the haptic nature of type production and its technological, philosophical, and historical aspects. He holds a Master in design from Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam). He has founded Kief Type Foundry (a type foundry specialising in open-source Arabic fonts), TypePlatform (a research space for under-represented writing systems focusing on Arabic script), and co-founded TypeLab at Sandberg Instituut (an open platform to experiment with typography). He taught as a guest tutor at AUC (Egypt), VCU (Qatar), and Linnaeus University (Sweden). In addition, he often gives workshops and talks around the world. His type design work is featured on Google fonts, and his artworks were exhibited in DDW (UAE), CTM 2020 (Germany), Venice Biennale 2020 (Italy), MK&G-Hamburg (Germany), Mediamatic (Netherlands), and VCU (Qatar). His work was nominated for the Jameel Art Prize in 2013 and awarded Best Arabic Display font from Granshan in 2016.
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