We are proud to release our new logo. Designed by Marwa Gadallah, Hazine’s Art Editor, alongside the rest of the team, it is the product of over six months of brainstorming and drafts. But it is also reflective of all of the changes that have been going on at Hazine over the last year. For one thing, we’ve been doing more Arabic content. We’re running more guides and resources on researching various regions and peoples from the Kurds to Afghanistan. We’re publishing essays and criticism on pedagogy, museums, archives, typography and more. And as we become more criticism-oriented, you’ll see more comics, more photo essays, things that break moulds.
TYPE Lab (Credit to Sarah Shebl and the TYPE Lab design team).
While historians have made efforts to document the Arabic script from both historical and visual perspectives, few have made the information and resources on the Arabic script accessible to the general public. Bahia Shehab is an artist, activist and academic who has recently founded TYPE Lab at the American University in Cairo (AUC). TYPE Lab is dedicated to promoting the documentation and development of the Arabic script in both Arabic and English, as well as to encouraging conversation around its history and development. Here, she describes her team’s efforts to create a project that reproduces and documents over 70,000 historical and contemporary Arabic letters in the Visual Encyclopedia of Arabic Letters, a TYPE Lab project, and make them open access so that artists, designers, historians and academics can learn more about the letters’ aesthetic features as well as their chronological information. While the TYPE Lab website is underway, the Facebook and Instagram pages are regularly used to share Arabic letters as well as events that host various designers, historians, publishers, academics and other speakers who have experience with the Arabic script. As this project unfolds over the coming years, we look forward to how Shehab and her team will have developed this project and taken it further.
(Questions by Marwa Gadallah, with contributions by N.A. Mansour)
