Marlik
Rosetta · Borna Izadpanah · 2018
A reimagining of the simplified Arabic genre by Borna Izadpanah, restoring proper calligraphic proportions while retaining the streamlined modernist aesthetic that made the style popular.
About
Simplified Arabic arose from hot-metal constraints, trading calligraphic nuance for economy, but the compromises it produced — stiff baselines, illegible letter combinations and awkward joins — were never resolved. Izadpanah, working with art director Fiona Ross, addresses each of these failings directly, returning conventional Arabic proportions to a genre that had abandoned them. Nine weights from Thin to Black, available as a variable font, make the family suitable for everything from newspaper text to poster headlines.
Classification
Marlik belongs to the simplified Arabic genre, a style developed for hot-metal typesetting that strips back contextual letterforms and ligatures in favour of a pared-down modernist aesthetic. The Latin component is drawn from Skolar Sans, a humanist sans-serif.