I present Hatran as the last font of 2023. The Hatran script was used in what is now northern Iraq to write Hatran Aramaic, a Middle Aramaic dialect that was spoken in the region of Hatra and Assur in northeastern Mesopotamia from about the 3rd Century BC to the 3rd Century AD. Hatran Aramaic is also known as Aramaic of Hatra or Ashurian (Leššānā Assūrāyā \ ܠܫܢܐ ܐܣܘܪܝܐ), and first appeared in writing in 98 BC. The script is also known as the Hatran Aramaic script or Ashurian script. It appears mainly in texts found in the ruins of Hatra. There are also some texts in Hatran Aramaic from Assur and other places. It was discovered in 1912 by archaeologtists working in Hatra, which is near to the villages of Al-Hadar (الحضر) in the Nineveh Governorate (محافظة نينوى) of Iraq.

Jh Fares is a modern / simple Kufic style font. The user may notice plenty of white space around the text leading to a highly readable font. The Kufic script is one of the oldest Arabic Handwriting, first appeared in el Koufa - Iraq. The original calligraphy was derived from the Aramaic letters; later it went thru lots of enhancements. Its typical uses include decorative writings for Mosques / palaces, Magazines / Newspapers / Books titles and Greetings.

Kufica is a geometric sans serif display family based on the kufic style, a 7th century calligraphic form of the Arabic script originates from Kufa, Iraq. It’s quite amazing that a historic Arabic calligraphic style can be implemented into a modern (even futuristic!) typeface that serves so well in modern advertising, branding, packaging, posters and so on. Kufica family comes in 2 weights with italics, each of the fonts has solid language support with over 430 glyphs.

Basim Marah is an Arabic display typeface and is useful for titles and graphic projects. The font is based on the simple lines of free style calligraphy. A collaborative effort, Basim Marah was designed and drawn by Basim Salem Al Mahdi from Iraq and then digitalized as a typeface by Hasan Abu Afash from Palestine. In November, 2008, Basim Marah was upgraded by working with Mirjam Somers an award-winning Arabic type designer to the DecoType font format for use in WinSoft Tasmeem which is now bundled with InDesign CS4.

Shock and Awe is a family of two display typefaces drawn up from lettering that has been at the centre of major historical events. Enola Gay is based upon nose art from the B-29 Superfortress bomber that dropped the first atomic bomb, on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, in 1945. Tomahawk is based upon the fuselage lettering of the original (then) General Dynamics manufactured Tomahawk cruise missile. Tomahawk missiles were introduced into military service in the 1970s and have been deployed by US and UK 'coalition' forces in a number of conflicts, including both the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Aesthetic production by Marcus McCallion.

HS Albasim A is an Arabic display typeface. It is useful for headlines, books covers and other graphic projects. It is a collaborative effort, as "HS Albasim A" first letters were designed and drawn by Basim Salem Al Mahdi from Iraq and then developed and digitalized as a typeface by Hasan AbuAfash from Palestine. The font is based on the simple lines of Fatmic Kufi but was it distinguished by two main ideas: First, it contains a nice serf in the vertical strokes of its letters. The second, some of storks in its letter differ in the thickness instead of being similar, as it is in the Fatmic Kufi style. The font contains only two weights: regular and bold. Both of them support the OpenType features of Arabic, Persian and Urdu.

Don't you HATE it when this happens? You're protesting the war in Iraq, and the other protesters keep pointing at you and giggling. You can't figure out what they could possibly be laughing at...You look up and then it hits you: you're holding a sign that looks like it was made by your 5-year old kid brother. It's sloppy, the words are crooked, hell, it's BARELY READABLE. How is anyone ever going to take you seriously with THAT SIGN???? There's only one solution...To further your cause, you need Burghal Design's Peace font. Peace contains upper and lower letters, numbers, punctuation, even foreign accented characters! Clean, concise, and oh, SO legible, you'll have no problem getting your message across with this typeface. Who knows, you might even make the evening news.

Ninova is a historical city that was the capital of the Assyrian Kingdom and its ruins are located within the borders of Iraq today. It is also known as the city where Prophet Jonah was sent. Ninova font family consists of fonts with aesthetic forms that appeal to human taste at the maximum level. Ninova font will more than meet the needs and expectations in terms of the glyphs it contains, the weights it has and the number of styles. This font includes two font families: Ninova: A family of fonts containing only the Latin scripts Ninova Pro: A family of fonts including Latin and Arabic scripts The Ninova font can be used for multiple purposes. It can also be used in the internet environment and operating systems along with printing areas.

NYC Graffiti is translated into a lively comic letter-style that is highly engaging. GhostKid was inspired by a few graffiti murals tagged "iRAK", the four letters that ended up inspiring this uber-black typeface. GhostKid has now been expanded to a Pro version to include a Small Caps set, Unlimited Fractionals, Superiors & Inferiors, and Ordinals. GhostKid Pro achieves a wider appeal and a new sense of personality, taking its comic display typestyle to a whole new level.

The Jazayeri Kufic Shoushtar font is a beautiful typographic implementation of the decorative Kufic calligraphy inscribed on the walls of the historic Grand Mosque of Shoushtar in southwestern Iran. This mosque contains many other inscriptions added over time for documentary purposes but its four monumental Kufic inscriptions which are revived in this font are the most essential ones to understand its design and meaning. Built in the ninth century CE, this mosque is one of the earliest hypostyle mosques in Iran. It was built in “the city of scholars” when its residents included two great Sufis, Sahl Ibn Abdullah Tostari and Mansur Hallaj. The designer and producer of the font is Seyed Mohammad Vahid Mousavi Jazayeri, a well-known Iranian master calligrapher, designer, scholar, and author. Mousavi Jazayeri has taken a personal interest in the Kufic script and devoted years to independent research, visiting archaeological locations, historic buildings and cemeteries, mosques, libraries and museums to study the script through direct contact. He has developed a systematic research methodology and published his findings in several books. His professional interest in script and calligraphy stimulated his discovery of the historic method for cutting the Kufic pen, which has had a direct impact on his own work, as seen in several well-received exhibitions and workshops. The historical research and achievements of Mousavi Jazayeri brought together the first international group dedicated to the study and revival of the historic Kufic script operation through kuficpedia.com.

Here at Comicraft we have seen the signs on the headline news, we have read the portents of things to come... yes, just as thunder is a sign of storm, just as pumpkins outside Ralph's on November the 1st are sure to be on sale, just as fresh produce becomes rotten, as sure as night turns to day, dark turns to gray, winter turns to spring and milk turns sour if you leave it out on the kitchen table overnight... Yes, here at Comicraft we know there's a signpost up ahead... a sign heading not into the twilight zone, but down a road of hope and hard work, a banner year, a red letter day, we know it's time to knuckle down, soldier on and pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. Well, we should probably pull ourselves up by our bootstraps BEFORE we soldier on, NEVERTHELESS, here it is -- not a soundbite, not an unfulfilled campaign promise -- SignLanguage is a font that makes the impossible possible, a font that cuts the taxes for 95% of American families, a font that closes down Gitmo and brings our troops home from Iraq. Senator Joe "Six Pack" Biden has described SignLanguage as articulate and bright and clean -- and a nice-looking font. In conclusion, Comicraft recommends you elect Sign Language.

Kashi is the Persian word for tile. This font is inspired from building decorations of 16th and 17th centuries in Iran. It is extremely legible even in very small size. Kasha design fulfills the following needs: A Explicitly crafted for use in electronic media fulfills the demands of electronic communication. B Suitability for multiple applications. Gives the widest potential acceptability. C Extreme legibility not only in small sizes, but also when the type is filtered or skewed, e.g., in Photoshop or Illustrator. Nima’s simplified forms may be artificial obliqued in InDesign or Illustrator, without any loss in quality for the effected text. D An attractive typographic image. Kasha was developed for multiple languages and writing conventions. Kashi supports Arabic, Persian and Urdu. It also includes proportional and tabular numerals for the supported languages. E The highest degree of calligraphic grace and the clarity of geometric typography.

ITC Astro is the typeface that proves you can get your work done while watching cartoons. “It all started as a series of doodles while I was watching The Jetsons,” recalls Sasa Petricic. “The show's impossibly simplistic vision of the twenty-first century cried out for a font that fit into that world -- a world where everyday objects can carry far more fun and personality than they should.” ITC Astro is the first commercial typeface design from Petricic, whose “day job” is working as a reporter for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Petricic has filed stories from across Canada and around the world for CBC's flagship evening newscast, The National. His reports have also appeared on CNN and BBC Television. Petricic's work as a correspondent and video journalist have taken him to six continents, covering everything from famine and genocide in Africa to the war in Iraq. With such serious matters filling the hours of Petricic's day as a journalist, it's not hard to see why he conceived Astro as a welcome blast of whimsy. “As I began to draw the design,” he says, “I decided that every part of Astro should be a cartoon character unto itself.” Each character has its own baseline shadow (or coaster, or circular antigravity generator, depending on how you look at things). The angular caps dance jauntily, rocking from left to right, while a suite of companion small caps provide backup. The end result is a design quite unlike any other, with surprising charm and versatility. ITC Astro comes in a two-weight family of White and Black.

This is the Viking font that I developed based on the letters in the Irk Bitig book, which is written with the brush line of the old Turkish runic alphabet, the information below. It was interesting work. Irk Bitig or Irq Bitig (Old Turkic: 𐰃𐰺𐰴 𐰋𐰃𐱅𐰃𐰏‎), known as the Book of Omens or Book of Divination in English, is a 9th-century manuscript book on divination that was discovered in the "Library Cave" of the Mogao Caves in Dunhuang, China, by Aurel Stein in 1907, and is now in the collection of the British Library in London, England. The book is written in Old Turkic using the Old Turkic script (also known as "Orkhon" or "Turkic runes"); it is the only known complete manuscript text written in the Old Turkic script. It is also an important source for early Turkic mythology.

Anbar is an Arabetic typeface design with visually connected glyphs, named after the historical Iraqi province Anbar, which is traditionally believed to be the birthplace of the earliest Arabic script, Jazm. It follows the guidelines of the Mutamathil Taqlidi type style with one glyph for every basic Arabic Unicode character or letter, as defined in Unicode Standards, and one additional final form glyph for each Arabic letter that can connect with other letters from both sides in traditional cursive Arabic strings. Anbar employs variable x-height values. It includes all required Lam-Alif ligatures and selected marks. Tatweel (or Kashida) glyph is a zero width space. Keying it before any glyph will display that glyph isolated form, if desired. Keying Tatweel before Alif Lam Lam Ha will display the Allah ligature. Anbar typeface family includes both Arabic and Arabic-Indic numerals; all required diacritic marks, in addition to Standard English keyboard punctuations and major currency symbols. Anbar is available in regular and italic (slated to the left) styles.

Bartosh is the American short form for Bartholomew. Although I chose this font name because of its sound and its short conciseness, I also liked the fact that Bartholomew had been one of the 12 apostles who had worked in India and Iran and the idea that his spirit could be the inspiration for my work.Bartosh was designed for display on the screen: the large x-height and the clear, open shapes facilitate readability. As a result, it develops a strong expression of character and makes it ideal for headings or highlighting individual text passages – it is ideal for captions of any kind. In each of the six weights, it unfolds its own and special charm. The extra-bold version is particularly noteworthy because fonts in this stroke width are rare and it is precisely these extreme bolds that give them a special graphic appeal.For all fonts there are matching italics in a well-developed set of 677 characters. In addition, it is possible to change the digits and currency characters from proportional to tabular or OldStyle via the OpenType feature, and small caps are also available in all fonts.

Wardruna Arabic is a method of writing Arabic with a Runic-like alphabet devised by Devin Lester. He imagined that if some vikings had settled in the Middle East, they might have started speaking Arabic and writing it with a version of the Runic alphabet. This particular alphabet is based on Tolkien's Cirth Runes. A band of vikings went to Baghdad after raiding in Europe. The markets in Constantinople were closed as the Turks had just sacked the city. These men had heard of the great market in Baghdad and went there to sell their wares, seeing that this land was warm and fertile they decided to stay. They ended up settling the land and taking Arab wives and having children, because of thier Northern European accent their Arabic evolved into a part-Arabic dialect of Iraqi arabic. This is why today you see a few Arabs with green eyes and dark blonde or red hair. The Arabic alphabet was too fluid for them and vikings disdained the use of paper as a persons writings could be burned, so the evolved their runes to fit Arabic.

The Mashq script is the oldest documented Arabic Jazm calligraphy style. It was invented by the early Muslims in the Arabian cities of Mecca and Medina, exclusively for writing the Quran and other Islamic religious texts. The Mashq style employed complex ligature and multi-level baseline rules, and therefore it went through a continuous simplification process. Around the time period Mashq was developed, the early Arab Muslims experimented with another short-lived Mashq-like style with heavily slanted vertical stems, which closely resembled the common Ḥijazi style. This style is commonly referred to as the Ma’il (slanted) style. Eventually, the early complex Mashq style was replaced as the main Islamic Arabic script, by a more simplified Mashq-derived calligraphy style that was developed in the city of Kufa, modern day Iraq, which was commonly referred to as Kufi. The Kufic style became the official Arabic script style for centuries before it was replaced by the more developed Naskh, the modern Arabic script style used today. The Mashq font family by Arabetics includes three styles of Mashq. The first is Mashq regular, which closely follows the script style of Musḥaf ‘Uthman (currently displayed in the Topkapi Museum in Turkey) with only the initial and final Haa’ baselines shifting. The second is Mashq Maail, which emphasizes the features of the Ma’il style shared with Mashq. The third is Mashq Kufi, which closely follows the script style in an adequate sample from the Quran manuscripts of the Bergstraesser Archive. All three fonts include two styles, with and without Tashkeel (dots). The Mashq and Mashq Kufi fonts include two more styles, with and without Harakat (soft vowels), and Hamza. Only three soft vowels are implemented along with their Tanween (double) forms. The Sukoon vowel is the default shape before inserting a soft vowel. Hamza was treated as a vowel in the Mashq and early Kufi manuscripts. Kashida is a zero width character. In the Mashq fonts, inserting one Kashida before the final ‘Ayn glyph group will trigger alternative shapes. In the Mashq Kufi fonts, inserting one Kashida (or two) before the final Yaa’, ‘Ayn, and Ḥaa’ glyph groups will trigger alternative shapes. The Mashq font family by Arabetics was designed to be as compatible as possible with the Arabic keyboard and Unicode alphabet used in computers today. Calligraphic variations were implemented only when they marked significant and permanent script features.