New Persian[Arabic]-Latin Font by Shahab Siavash
"KayKhosrow" is a legendary king of the Kayanian dynasty and a character in the Persian epic book, Shahnameh. He was the son of the Iranian prince "Siavash" :)
Hello,
First, I want to mention that I am a graphic designer and typographer. I was writing articles and books in the past few years about graphic and type design. Being awarded as a critic and have had several exhibitions in Iran and other countries. I’m usually into designing new modern Persian fonts, you may call them “fantasy” or “display” or… The name is not important. My well-known typeface was the first Persian grunge typeface (2005) which was featured on Behance in 2009 and has been published in books and websites. But today I’m going to talk about this typeface and why & how I designed it.
We have all seen the very big difference between Latin and Persian alphabets. One has vertical, almost isometric, monospaced letters and the other one has ups and downs on and off the baseline, also different weights and widths are another issue. When we use these two alphabets in a design, letters doesn’t match. But we accept that, because there was no other choice.
So, I decided to do something about this and I realized that I should change the Persian alphabet in a modern typographic way. I did these things:
1- Removed the connection between the letters. [All Persian (Arabic) letters are connected to each other unlike the Latin letters.] To do this I made the letters vertical oriented and separated from each other.
2- Once you decide to accomplish number 1, you realize that you should design the letters from scratch. So I did. Every single letter in this Persian alphabet is redesigned to fit this idea. But all of them are inspired by the original letters. Any Persian (Arabic) parson can read them. This is a typographic approach to design a modern Persian typeface.
3- After doing all of that, now there is no need to have 4 (or 2) forms for each letter. (Initial, medial, final and isolated glyphs) Therefore, this font performs like a Latin typeface and shows one form for each letter.
4- I also wanted to do this in an isometric and monospaced style. There are no angles except 90 degrees. I too, changed some of the Latin letters to reach this goal. (I want to mention that this is a new style to design Persian fonts and can be improved or changed through time by others in different ways.)
5- And to complete the fantasy, the typeface comes with 7 different families and 12 styles! It enables the user to have a good experience with the type. The families and subfamilies are:
I. KayKhosrow [Regular, Italic, Bold, Black, BoldItalic, BlackItalic]
II. KayKhosrowOblique [Regular]
III. KayKhosrowOutline [Regular]
IV. KayKhosrowRound [Regular]
V. KayKhosrowSmooth [Regular]
VI. KayKhosrowInline [Regular]
VII. KayKhosrowPurePersian* [Regular]
*Pure Persian style only produces pure Persian letters and also replaces Latin letters with phonetic ones, enabling all Persian people to write Persain words with Latin letters.
AND: A "Color Font" (4 TTF files: Layers, COLR, SVG, sbix)
ICYDN: http://blog.fontlab.com/font-tech/color-fonts/color-font-format-proposals/
I did metrics, kerning and hinting for all of them. 2 styles support Stylistic Alternates {salt}.
This font and its styles are pioneers in some aspects:
- The first Persian-Latin font that brings exactly similar glyphs for the 2 languages.
- The first Persian font with totally new detached glyphs.
- The first Persian font with 12+1 different styles.
- The first Persian font with a "Pure Persian" style, which you can wrtie Pinglish or Persian in a new way.
- The First Persian color font, ever!
And of course a neat monospaced isometric Latin font with 10 different styles and 4 versions of a color font is included.
Persian (Arabic) typefaces are very poor when it comes to styles and modernity. Unfortunately, Google Fonts doesn’t have a lot of them, too.
I hope this can be a good candidate to be in the GF.
Thanks for reading this,
Shahab Siavash , 2016
You can download the KayKhosrow fonts from here: https://font.shahabsiavash.com
Microsoft Vendor ID: SHS