Since more than a decade, the Amsterdam based Khatt Foundation matches designers form different cultures to develop multilingual typographical systems. The most recent Typographic Matchmaking in the Maghrib, combined (among others) the powers of two TypeMedia alumni that both presently live and work in Amsterdam.
Laura Meseguer and Kristyan Sarkis will offer insight into the Typographic Machtmaking in the Maghrib project and present their result: the TDC award-winning trilingual typeface Qandus.
In the Maghreb, the confluence of native cultures with different colonial periods has produced an extraordinarily diverse heritage. The history of this region and the Andalus could be told in more than twenty languages and written in any of the three common writing systems: Latin, Arabic and Tifinagh.
From this context the Typographic Matchmaking in the Maghrib Project of the Khatt Foundation came into being as a way to facilitate a cultural trialogue, as well as shed a typographic spotlight on the largely ignored writing and design traditions of the region. The specific goal of the collaboration is the research and development of tri-script font families that can communicate harmoniously. The project created an excellent opportunity for interaction and conversation between the members of all the different teams, as they researched the environment in which those scripts originated, evolved, and were used, through field trips to Marrakech, Córdoba and Granada.
