There is plenty of lyric and literature about looking over one's shoulder in contemplation. What would you have done differently if you knew then what you know now? This is the kind of question that comes out of nowhere. When it does and whether its context is personal or professional make very little difference. It's a question that can cause emotions to rise and passions to run hot. It can trigger priority shifts and identity crises. It's never easy to answer. Three years ago, I published a font called Semilla. My aim with that was to distill the work of Bentele, a lettering artist from early 1950s Germany. Picking such an obscure figure back then was my way of pondering the meaning and efficiency of objectivity in a world where real human events and existences are inevitably filtered through decades of unavoidably subjective written, printed and oral history. And maybe to pat myself on the back for surviving surprises mild and pleasant. Having been fortunate enough to follow my professional whims for quite some time now, I took another, longer look at my idea of distilling Bentele's work again. I suppose the concepts of established history and objectivity can become quite malleable when personal experience is added to the mix. I say that because there I was, three years later, second-guessing myself and opining that Bentele's work can be distilled differently, in a manner more suited to current cultural angles. So I embarked on that mission, and Bowling Script is the result. I realize that it's difficult to reconcile this soft and happy calligraphic outcome with the introspection I've blathered about so far, but it is what is. I guess even self-created first world problems need to be resolved somehow, and the resolution can happen in mysterious ways. Bowling Script is what people who like my work would expect from me. It's yet another script loaded with all kinds of alternation, swashing and over-the-top stuff. All of that is in here. These days I think I just do all that stuff without even blinking. But there are two additional twists. The more noticeable one is ornamental: The stroke endings in the main font are of the typical sharp and curly variety found in sign painting, while the other font complements that with ball endings, sometimes with an added-on-afterwards impression rather than an extension of the actual stroke. In the philosophical terms I was mumbling earlier, this is the equivalent of alternate realities in a world of historical reduxes that by their very nature can never properly translate original fact. The second twist has to do with the disruption of angular rhythm in calligraphic alphabets. Of course, this is the kind of lettering where the very concept of rhythm can be quite flexible, but it still counts for something, and experimenting with angular white space in a project of a very dense footprint was irresistible. After playing for a bit, I decided that it would interesting to include the option of using optically back-slanted forms in the fonts. Most scripts out there, including mine, have a rhythm sonically comparable to four-to-the-floor club beats. So the weirdly angled stuff here is your chance to do the occasional drumroll. Everyone knows we need one of those sometimes. Bowling Script and Bowling Script Balls fonts comes with 1600 characters and features extended Latin-based language support. There are also a basic version of both fonts without all the alternates and extra OpenType features. Bowling family ships in cross-platform OpenType format. We also want to present “Mute”, a visual essay narated by Tomás García and Valentín Muro, about digital life created specially to introduce Bowling Script.

Awwam refers to the region of Awwam which is now thought by most scholars to be Ma'rib or the famous temple of Awwam otherwise known as Mahram Bilqis. The Awwam temple—Arabic Haram Bilqis or Mahram Bilqis—is a Sabaean temple near Ma'rib in today's Yemen. It was built by Mukarrib ‘Yada'il Dharih I’ between the 7th and 5th century B.C. Also, one of the most frequent titles of the God ‘Almaqah’ was the Lord of Awwam. Almaqah was the main God of the ancient Yemeni kingdom of Saba' and also the kingdoms of D’mt and Aksum in Eritrea and Northern Ethiopia. Different members of the ruling dynasties of Saba' regarded themselves as Almaqah’s children. Awwam is a wide and headline Arabic display typeface. The main trait of this typeface is the wide, curved, and streamlined design of its wide kashida, letters, and ligatures. This feature renders it as one of the modern stylish typefaces used for headlines, titles, headers, banners, and captions. Among the distinguished letters of Awwam typeface are the “Alef”, “Qaaf”, “Waaw”, “Yaa”, “Gheen”, and others. Moreover, Awwam typeface has a character set which supports Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and simple Latin letters/numerals with a limited range of specific Arabic and Latin ligatures. This typefac comes in two styles (i.e., Awwam, and Awwam-Pro) with a single weight (i.e., regular) and nearly 650 distinctive glyphs for each style. Due to its ultra-wide design, Awwam typeface is mostly appropriate for headings and titles in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. It can be graphically and visually exploited in books, novels, magazines, newsletters, pamphlets, posters, and interfaces of other objects such as clothes and equipment. Moreover, it can be pleasingly used for signs, books’ covers, advertisement light boards, and titles of flyers, and books of children and adults. In brief, Awwam typeface is one of the new wide Arabic typefaces which can be utilized efficiently in diverse graphic, typographic, and artistic works for different languages and cultures.