Bilingua

In today’s world, every field of human activity, from commerce to art and design are influenced by the division and contrast of globalization versus local traditions. As a result of this blending, intercultural exchange gains importance, while cross-cultural communication becomes an essential step of every design process.

Ever since Kambiz Shafei started his education at the Basel School of Design HGK/FHNW, he has been interested in witnessing and exploring the differences and the similarities of Iranian and Swiss visual cultures. Since typography plays an significant role in both Iranian and Swiss contemporary graphic design, Shafei decided to focus on this topic as his Bachelor thesis project.

In the design process of Bilingua Kambiz Shafei has inquired different solutions in both Latin and Arabic-Persian type in order to harmonize the two opposite scripts and counteract the dangers of homogenizing these two typographic cultures.

Finding new proportions such as x-height and teeth-height, balancing the legibility and the color of the two scripts in different sizes, designing an extra set of baseline ligatures for the Latin character set and harmonizing the stroke weight of the letterforms are a few examples of Kambiz Shafei’s work in order to create similar typographic “Look and Feel“ in Arabic-Persian and Latin Alphabet.