AwanZaman has a three-phase story, beginning with Dr Mamoun Sakkal’s two Arabic styles and culminating with Juliet Shen’s Latin extension. AwanZaman started as simply Awan, a commission for a modern, clean, monoline typeface for writing headlines and story titles in a forward-thinking Kuwaiti newspaper. Awan was based on the geometric forms of Kufic script, while in phase two, a second typeface (Zaman) was designed to add enough calligraphic Naskh details to make it easy to read in demanding newspaper settings. Together these two phases give the typeface a warm, familiar, and progressive look, as well as an explanatory two-part name — AwanZaman. Since most editorials use typical Naskh headline fonts with an exaggerated baseline, Awan’s rational forms immediately distinguish it as a modern and progressive voice in the crowded field of Arabic editorial typefaces. As the companion Arabic typeface, Zaman has the same basic proportions and forms as Awan, but with many cursive, energetic, and playful details. And since modern monoline fonts are increasingly being used to set extended texts, more features were borrowed from Naskh calligraphy to expand the typeface’s use from headlines into text setting. When using the AwanZaman Arabic family, Awan (geometric Kufic forms) is the starting point. To add the sweeping, energetic personality of Zaman (calligraphic Naskh forms), simply activate an alternate character through the option of 20 stylistic sets available in any OpenType-savvy software. The two typefaces function as one file — the AwanZaman Arabic family — allowing users to combine features from both designs to transform the appearance of text from geometric and formal to playful and informal. The third phase of AwanZaman’s development introduced a companion Latin typeface designed by Juliet Shen to fulfil the persistent need in the Arabic fonts market for modern and geometric bilingual type families. Due to the Arabic’s monolinear strokes, AwanZaman Latin was destined to be a sans serif with a tall x-height, larger counters, and corresponding stem thickness to harmonise with the Arabic’s overall text colour and page presence. But it needed much more. One of AwanZaman’s chief assets is making the two languages look on a par when typeset side by side. Arabic and English readers will have a different sense of what that entails, but this type family defers to the Arabic — graceful and artistic with a good mix of straight stems and curved forms. Latin in general doesn’t aesthetically flow the way Arabic does, yet the tone of the Latin needed to mirror both the Arabic’s more squarish curves and formal personality of Awan and the undulating and more playful shapes of Zaman without looking outlandish. That need was met by creating some novel Latin characters, which are accessed through four stylistic sets the same way as AwanZaman Arabic. The alternates are not just clever in the way they look and how they echo the Arabic aesthetic, but also in harmonising the disparate languages and serving designers well when needing a balanced, bilingual text face with a warm and lively voice. AwanZaman is a clever, seven-weight powerhouse that makes extensive use of OpenType’s stylistic sets (20 in the Arabic and four in the Latin) so writers and designers can make the most of everything from a single glyph in display sizes down to dense text in paragraphs. As AwanZaman Arabic has no italic, neither does the Latin; contextual distinction normally handled by italics is achieved by exploiting the family’s seven weights. AwanZaman’s intricate OpenType programming supports Persian and Urdu, with features such as the returning tail of Barri Yeh treated properly. From its inception in geometry to its melding of two worlds with novel forms, AwanZaman is a personal labor by designers Dr Mamoun Sakkal and Juliet Shen, and embodies the TypeTogether ideals of serving the global community with innovative and stylish typeface solutions. The complete AwanZaman Arabic and Latin families, along with our entire catalogue, have been optimised for today’s varied screen uses.

Imagine being printer in the early nineteenth century, your stock isn’t the finest, your lead characters are worn out: Voilá Kandidat Rough. But wait, Kandidat isn’t the usual scan-an-old-book,-put-the-glyphs-in-a-font-and-you’re-done-font. Kandidat Rough has a variety of whopping 14 alternates for most characters. Our algorithm changes the letters automatically. All you have to do is turn on Contextual Alternates in your layout app. The algorithm is the best we’ve seen so far, and it’s so good that even same words appear in different forms. And should by coincidence words have the same glyphs, just assign a different Style Set to the first letter, and all other letters in the word will change as well (well, it depends a bit on your software). The mechanism isn’t perfect and maybe we stretched OpenType capabilities a bit over the top, but we yet haven’t seen any better routine for switching letters on the fly. Is it worth to mention that Kandidat Rough not only speaks English, but also German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Croatian, Turkish and most likely some other languages? Maybe. To be sure whether your language is supported, this is the typeset of all letters: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZÀÁÂÃÄÅÆÇÈÉÊËÌÍÎÏÑÒÓÔÕÖØÙÚÛÜÝĆČĐĞ݌ފŸŽ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzàáâãäåæçèéêëìíîïñòóôõöøùúûüýÿćčđğıœşšž Apart from that we also included the following punctuation and currency symbols: !"#$%&'()*+,-./:;?@[\]_{|}¡©«®°±¶·»¿×–—‘’‚“”„†•…‹›⁄≠☞ €¢$£¥ This sums up to nearly 3000 glyphs per font, and we have three of them: Regular, Italic and Bold. All neatly kerned. All in all a great repertoire for even the most demanding book or advert jobs with a look of old times. And now imagine you are sick of the rugged print experience Kandidat Rough delivers: go for Kandidat. This is our Scotch-ish ancestor the Rough version was made from. A sturdy, friendly, round, warm friend from the beginning of the nineteenth century. A bit dark, maybe. You will like it. Kandidat has the aforementioned type set plus complete Baltics, Eastern Europe and Cyrillic. Plus a couple of gimmicks like fleurons, stars, circled numbers, arrows, and, and, and… Kandidat Regular additionally has small caps for Latin based scripts (not Cyrillic). The spick and span Kandidat font set also consists of Regular, Italic and Bold cuts. The bold cut is on the very bold side and can nicely be used for headings, whereas Italic is a great companion for Regular. It took us some time and trouble to finish this project, but after all we are very proud of our little feat and hope you will enjoy Kandidat as much as we do. Enjoy!

Friendly is an homage to Morris Fuller Benton's adorable Announcement typeface. It is not a strict interpretation, digital revival or reverent reproduction of the original letterforms… but I would be remiss and shady to not acknowledge the letterforms that inspired this typeface. If you are looking for a more accurate 'scanned revival' I would recommend searching "Announcement" on MyFonts. As stated earlier, it is an homage to the original letterforms of the typeface but takes a great bit of freedom tightening the construction up in order to loosen up the movement of the variant letterforms to allow a great deal of usable personality. I enjoy stating this dichotomy… "loosen up to tighten up the forms" and vice versa. It seems counterintuitive or silly but by allowing the letterforms to normalize, I felt more comfortable going back and adding rather indulgent personality. Infused with stylistic alternates, swashes, titling, many many contextual alternates, 9 stylistic sets and 2 stylistic sets with wordmarks, the typeface became far more 'friendly' for me… how could it not? With so many loops, swashes and typographic indulgences, it was bound to be fun. The more elaborate and 'overdone' Friendly got, the more I wanted to slant it. Here's where my thinking differs from MFB's original. I like slanted romans… especially ones with long ascenders, but I do not like much of a slant. It has to be the lettering person in me. It's hard for me to do a completely upright serif and not pair it with an angle, but I did not feel Announcement's 'Italic' offered much and the actual slant needed to be far less. If it's not an italic, I prefer the letters to slant with an angle equivalent to the thickness of the vertical stroke. The Slanted version of Friendly is set at 3.6 degrees, is quite subtle, and very fitting for me. You will find that most characters have a contextual, stylistic, swash and titling alternate assigned to them and some have an echoed alternate to the swash and titling options if the stylistic alt has been selected in tandem. Additionally, all of these are accessible in the glyph palette directly from the base glyph typed or through selecting options through the Stylistic Sets 1–9. Stylistic Sets 10 & 11 are a little different. They are actually configured as complex majuscule ligatures… a result of me getting carried away. Other features like a default old style numeral set and coordinating glyphs have been produced along with case support, ordinals, and more have been added to make it more relevant for contemporary use.