

The Design Behind Arabic Calligraphy - ComputerGuru
http://creativebits.org/inspiration/arabic_calligraphy

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showerst
Shame you don't see more of this around, it's really one of the most elegant
artistic expressions I've ever encountered. It's a fascinating example of
working under constraints, as if the artists said 'No picturing living things?
No problem!'

I think one of the big reasons that the Semitic scripts in general haven't
caught on in western design is that they tend to be very 'dense', particularly
the calligraphy. It's easy to point to a Kanji symbol and say 'Ohh that's
Kaze, that represents Wind', whereas Arabic calligraphy tends to look like
just a cursive jumble without knowledge of the language. Couple this with the
strong capacity to offend by including the wrong religious symbolism, and you
have a recipe for disaster without considerable special knowledge.

I'm a pretty quick transliterator of Arabic, but some of the Calligraphy (and,
for that matter, many modern squared out fonts) is still quite challenging.
Hopefully as the Arab world as a whole grows wealthier (by Median not Average)
the design tools will catch up and allow for more of this stuff to filter in
to the western design world.

