Nadine Chahine’s been having one heck-of-a-day. For her, it must be surreal, seeing the typeface she created speak to her from the headlines of An-Nahar, Lebanon’s leading Arabic-language daily newspaper. Nadine is Lebanese. This is the paper she grew up with.
Nadine’s typeface was unveiled today as part of a major redesign of An-Nahar. This is no casual event. An-Nahar is a family run newspaper, first published in 1933 as a platform for expressing various opinions. The founder’s namesake grandson, Gebran Tueni, eventually ran the publication, but unfortunately his life came to a tragic end in 2005. The Gebran2005™ typeface, Nadine’s design, is named after him.
As Nadine designed the face, she realized she was creating a soul, if one were to exist for a typeface. She thought of Gebran and his own very public face – a man with a deep passion for free speech. She thought of An-Nahar and all those years she held it in her hands while growing up. And when she designed the face, she approached it so that every character mattered, as if each had a story to tell in itself.
Nadine’s story, in her own words and pictures, is here.
Nadine Chahine holds the latest edition of the redesigned An-Nahar, which features the Gebran2005 custom typeface she designed for the newspaper.
Good to see posts about typefaces for non-latin character sets. To better appreciate such typefaces (and to educate ignorant Americans like myself
, it would be great to see posts covering the key features, glyph variants, and trends present in non-latin typefaces.
Excellent ideas. Yes, we will do more to educate in this area. It’s great to have designers like Nadine provide inspiration to bring forward important topics like this. Thank you so much for commenting. — Vikki
Many thanks for the feedback! Non-Latin is a big field and once you dive into it, it starts to draw you in with all the various script systems. Definitely makes for a very interesting exploration!