Design Services: Complex Scripts
Culture
The Latin alphabet is used as the main script system by nearly a third of the world's population, but many cultures have developed their own, visually rich and intricate script systems. In some cases, such as Arabic and Hebrew, common roots are shared, tracing back thousands of years. Asian scripts, on the other hand, have developed independently and have no commonality with Latin at all.
With the exception of Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK), the other major script systems are largely alphabetic. Even though this dramatically reduces the size of character sets, it doesn't necessarily make the task of designing and engineering such fonts much easier - with character combinations forming into intricate ligatures, as in Devanagari, or the same character taking on a completely different physical appearance depending on its position and context within a word, as in Arabic, there's more to alphabetic scripts than meets the eye.
Sourcing
We are often asked to assist in sourcing complex script fonts which are a close match to font which has already been chosen for a corporate identity, or any other purpose. Unfortunately, it is our experience that mostly low quality products are available for many complex scripts, in particular for South East Asia. The variety of designs that users of Latin, Greek and Cyrillic fonts have come to expect simply does not exist.
Design
We design most major complex script systems in-house, with the oversight and collaboration of recognized experts in each field to ensure respectful treatment of heritage and culture. If you'd like to discuss your language needs, wherever in the world you need to communicate, please contact us.