On Stage Serial Font How To Read And

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Background I have no design education and started creating my first font a sans serif called Gidole a year ago and the process has been somewhat like this: Pick a one I liked (DIN) Find inspiration in other fonts (Clear Sans, San Francisco, Roboto etc.) and look at how they are drawn, the dimensions etc.

Start drawing and make it open source Get feedback help from some extremely helpful people online Continue to improve and expand it to cover more languages with great help as e.g.

People are much more inclined to help you when its an open source project Ethiopia I grew up in Ethiopia so I wanted to create a typeface in an effort to contribute to a rich and friendly culture which has given me so much.

Ethiopia is the worlds 13th biggest country with an estimated 92 million people ( wiki ).

It is unfortunately also 1015th from the bottom on the list of GDP per capita ( wiki ).

Amharic Amharic is the official language in Ethiopia and has around 22 million native speakers ( wiki ).

Around 0.0007 of the internet is in Amharic including some 13.000 articles on wikipedia ( w3techs.com og wiki ).

I havent been able to find the number of sites like this article in English with some Amharic in them but I expect that number to be a lot bigger since all classes in Ethiopian secondary school are in English and typing Amharic on a computer can be a bit difficult.

A quick Google search for selam (hellopeace) gave 350.000 results.

If you dont see an extra space or maybe some after e.g.

Amharic font is installed on your system.

All fidls are consonantvowel pairs and depending on how you count there are around 250 of them (all not shown in the chart).

The is a system so that the basic letter-shape is the consonant and the flag is the vowel e.g.: An H shape is z and a flag in the middle to the right is u so is zu.

If you take my name Andreas its actually pronounced ndrjas where is pronounced like a in about, e in taken, i in pencil etc its the most common vowel sound in many languages including Amharic and English ( wiki ).

Getting started Since there arent that many (good) Amharic fonts my process has been more experimental and less mimicking but I still started by looking for inspiration in my old albums and online of images of signs, labels etc.

Existing Fonts I then searched for existing Amharic fonts and the only latinisedmodern version of the amharic script I have found is Noto.

I cant say that much positive about it but note that some of the odd letters can be explained by the font being inspired by handwriting with a pencil and not a brush.

The two prettiest Amharic fonts in my book are Nyala and Abyssinica SIL but they are both as most Amharic fonts fairly calligraphic with high contrast and lots of detail.

This is why e.g. Nyala is 444kb which is a lot for a font with 912 characters.

In comparison Gidole is currently 83kb and has 888 characters.

My Font I want the fidls to match the latin letters in Gidole which is a minimal and slightly geometric sans serif.

This means I cant use Nyala and Abyssinica for direct inspiration but they serve as great guidelines for overall shapes, dimensions, angles, proportions etc.

The First Letters I learned reading and writing in the local kindergarten but moved to a Scandinavian boarding school at 7 where we werent really taught Amharic.

On Stage Serial Font How To Read And

So I forgot how to read and write but I know how the fidls should look and one of the words I remember seeing most is my own name so I started drawing that.

The fidls in my name are also diverse which meant I had to make quite a few design choices that other letters will also incoorporate.

I will talk about those design choices in the next post(s) and for now just show you a couple of old sketches anda comparison with other fonts.

Notice the bolder weight and more minimal flags compared to the current version below.

Once I start churning out letters I will be updating this GitHub issue for feedback and more.