typography

AbiFarès is the Founding Director of the Khatt Foundation and Khatt Books publishers. Based in Amsterdam, her professional, cultural, and educational activities extend from the US and Europe to the Arab World. She is the curator behind the Inner Structures–Outer Rhythms: Contemporary Arab & Persian Graphic Design exhibition in the Main Gallery as well as a book of the same title. She holds degrees in design and design history from Leiden University (PhD, 2017), Yale University (MFA, 1990), and Rhode Island School of Design (BFA, 1987). She was a jury member of the Third Jameel Prize for Islamic Art and Design 2013 (Victoria & Albert Museum, London), and member of the grants selection committee for Mondrian Foundation (2011-2012) & The Netherlands Architecture and Design Fund (2013). She is a member of AGI (Alliance Typographique Internationale). Dr Smitshuijzen AbiFarès specializes in multilingual typographic research and design, with focus on Arabic typography and design history. She has published several books on typography and design from the Arab World, and contributed essays to professional and academic publications. AbiFarès is the author of Arabic Typography: A Comprehensive Sourcebook (2001/2021), Typographic Matchmaking (2007), Typographic Matchmaking in the City (2011), Arabic Type Design for Beginners (2013), Nomadic Traces: Journeys of Arabian Scripts (2019), Kameel Hawa: The Art of Shaping Arabic Letters (2019), Typographic Matchmaking in the Maghrib (forthcoming), and The Catholic Press of Beirut: A Printing and Design Legacy in the Arab East (forthcoming). She taught design and typography courses at design programs in the Middle East and Europe. She works as an independent design curator, researcher, writer, designer, and publisher.

As a graphic designer, I speak through visuals. Typography, Motion Graphics, Prints, Photography...anything that you see in the room or street around you. I am a person who explores and tries different fields and multimedia to design and express my own personality and thoughts, create new environments and spaces and create new visual effects and interactive experiences. My main focus is always communication, as motivation for this work. Firstly, I want to present my own understanding and expression of communication such as using my own features to apply it to develop traditional Chinese characters. Secondly, in the process of integrating different languages to facilitate communication between different countries, I also want to explore and discover the evolution of language.

For my thesis project, I use the word/object as a canvas to imprint my analysis of the cultural rifts generated when we position ourselves in an unrelated cultural context, using handwriting to address a more personal take on the way we communicate via the written word. The text presented is an original poem written in both Spanish and English that will reflect on my personal experience as a Colombian now living in the United States. The thread that joins a word and its meaning is susceptible to alterations when subjected to translation into a different language. I posit the notion that even when we do not understand each other's language, we all have a story to tell and have more things in common than we realize.

This thesis—Beyond Screens—uses form, type, motion, and coding to enable the audience to see and play with typographic elements in both abstract and applied form by creating dynamic and interactive environments. To engage people in various ways, this thesis is designed as a system to be used across various media. It includes two components—four posters and a website. Rather than relying simply on 2D or 3D, it is a more complicated dimensional space; I am creating enjoyment for the audience beyond the screen, both digital and print, by inviting them into a multidimensional space. For the website, I created five pages based on rhythm; point, line, and play; form and counter-form; color words; and color in space. All the form in the poster design were inspired from the web design. As a designer, I understand the need for legibility, but I am more concerned with communicating something more visceral, expressive, and imaginative. Instead of drawing conclusions, Beyond Screens seeks a field of discovery, one that requires inquiry as opposed to conclusions.

Even thought Chinese and English are in completely disparate language systems, however, at the point of graphic visual effect, they are both formed by points, lines and surfaces, which are the basic elements of design. This is their most uniform personality except a plenty of cultural and historical differences. Therefore, based on those differences and the similarity between Chinese and English, this group of typographic pieces explores the various built-up effects of 26 English letters in conjoined with different formats of Chinese characters, which generates a new typographic system that can be interpreted through in two languages. Since the essential idea of the thesis project is to let people from two separate cultural backgrounds find the familiar elements from their own culture but in an unfamiliar form. I hope to utilize perplexing combinations of layers would attract viewers to stay longer in front of the work, meanwhile, to leave more space for them interpretation.

My thesis fully utilizes the exhibition space, synthesizing several different manifestations of typographic form into a coherent environment¬¬¬¬, a typographic playground, which integrates and balances the cohesive forms of the abstract and the concrete, the three-dimensional and two-dimensional, monochrome and polychrome, physical object and digital object. Elements of the overall composition are reflected and repeated in order to inspire engagement with both the site and the viewer.