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.

Agmena™ has no historical precursor; it was designed from scratch by Jovica Veljovi? whose aim was to create a new book typeface. Although it generally has certain similarities with the group of Renaissance Antiqua fonts, it is not clearly derived from any of these. Clear and open forms, large counters and a relatively generous x-height ensure that the characters that make up Agmena are readily legible even in small point sizes. The slightly tapering serifs with their curved attachments to letter stems soften the rigidity of the typeface, bringing Agmena to life. This non-formal quality is further enhanced by numerous tiny variations to the letter shapes. For example, there are slight differences to the terminals of the b", the "d" and the "h" and minor dissimilarities in the forms and lengths of serifs of many of the letters. The tittles over the "i" and "j" and those of the German umlauts are almost circular, while the diamond shape that is more characteristic of a calligraphic script is used for the punctuation marks. Although many of these variations are only apparent on closer inspection, they are enough to give Agmena the feeling of a hand-made typeface. It is in the larger point sizes that this feature of Agmena comes particularly into play, and individual characters gain an almost sculptural quality. The italic variants of Agmena are actually real cursives. The narrower and thus markedly dynamically formed lowercase letters have a wider range of contrast in terms of line thickness and have the appearance of having been manually produced with a quill thanks to the variations in their terminals. The lowercase "a" assumes a closed form and the "f" has a descender. The italic capitals, on the other hand, have been consciously conceived to act as a stabilising element, although the way they have been inclined does not produce a simply mechanical effect. This visual convergence with the upright characters actually means that it is possible to use letters from both styles in combination. Agmena is available in four weights: Book, Regular, Semibold and Bold, and each has its matching italic variant. Veljovi? designed Book and Regular not only to provide an optical balance between various point sizes, such as between that used for the text and that used in footnotes, but also to take account of different paper forms: Regular for lined paper and Book for publishing paper. Agmena's range of characters leaves nothing to be desired. All variants include small caps and various numeral sets with oldstyle and lining figures for setting proportional text and table columns. Thanks to its pan-European language support, Agmena can be used to set texts not only in languages that use the Latin alphabet as it also features Cyrillic and Greek characters. The set of standard ligatures has been extended to include special combinations for setting Greek and Serbian. Agmena also has some initial letters, alternative glyphs and ornaments. Agmena is a poetic text font with forms and spacing that have been optimised over years of work to provide a typeface that is ideal for setting books. But its letters also cut a good figure in the larger font sizes thanks to their individual, vibrant and, in some cases, sculptural effects. Its robust forms are not merely suited to a printed environment, but are also at home among the complex conditions on terminal screens. You can thus also use Agmena as a web font when designing your internet page."Agmena has received the Certificate of Excellence in Type Design at the Type Directors Club of New York TDC2 competition in 2013.