I came across a useful online directory the other day, which I thought worth sharing. Now, directory sites have got a bad reputation over the years, often with good reason. Many are full of spam-like entries and are of little real use.

The Professional Web Design Directory is rather different. It is a helpful resource listing professional web designers who meet their knowledge guidelines. Rather than accepting all and sundry, the entries are checked by hand. What’s more, the listings have the facility for reviews from previous clients so you can learn from others’ experience.

What really caught my eye was the useful web design advice section. This has some good tips for both web designers and those looking for one. Topics range from “5 steps to find a good web designer” through to the more technical “Web designers who use GZIP create faster websites”!

Of course, for websites in languages other than English, WorldAccent offers a full range of website translation services. In fact, it was while I was reviewing our new pages on that service, that I came across the Professional Web Design Directory.

If you are considering getting yourself a website, don’t forget you also need to buy a domain name and get someone to host it. Some web designers will do this for you, but it’s often worth looking around for deals if you have a little technical competence.

Whether you are launching a new “must-read” site or sprucing up your existing pages with a redesign, good luck!

The business demand for any particular language can ebb and flow but, perhaps not surprisingly, one that’s busier than ever is Arabic. After all, Arabic is the official language of 26 countries, the first language of nearly 300 million people and a second language of nearly 280 million more. Our studio often find themselves working away on several Arabic typesetting projects at any given time. Given this expertise, I’ve been reflecting on the broader history, my pick of professional Arabic fonts and how the field is developing.

First, the present day. An interesting current trend is the design of Arabic fonts tailored to match an existing English typeface. These create powerful fonts which can be used to set both Arabic and English in harmony. So, for instance, Lucas Fonts have developed “TheSans Arabic” as part of their Thesis project, or font “superfamily”.

Meanwhile Linotype have developed one Arabic font around Neue Helvetica, and a second around Frutiger. These modern Arabic fonts follow the harsh geometries of their Roman equivalents. They have a corporate feel, and would make a great choice for signage.

The fonts also include support for Farsi and Urdu (although Urdu only in the form of Naskh rather than the more reader friendly Nastaliq – a distinction I’ll elaborate on at another time).

Arabic typesetting font
Of course, Linotype have also developed some excellent uniquely Arabic fonts, such as the Lotus, Badr and the ever-popular Yakout. I should add – before this starts sounding like an advert for Linotype – there are several great Arabic font designers and foundries working away. In fact, we are luckly enough to have hundreds of their creations.

For those thinking about dipping their toes in the waters of Arabic design or DTP, it’s worth pointing out that these fonts will not work correctly in the English versions of InDesign or Quark out of the box. You need to gain access to the World Ready Composer, and be able to access some specific Arabic features. Adobe has licensed the creation of InDesign ME (Middle East), a special version to deal with the additional demands and complexities of Arabic typesetting, which is always recommended for large projects. This is one of the reasons why many designers chose to get someone else to do their Arabic typesetting, receiving back outlined Arabic text within Indesign.

Traditional Arabic?
If that’s a glimpse of the future, what about the past? Those who are interested in the development of Arabic typefaces and calligraphy should definitely settle down to read the excellent article on ilovetypography.com, “Arabic calligraphy as a typographic exercise”. Although as the article points out in its introduction, “Arabic calligraphy” is a hybrid term more suited to English.

The article outlines some of the considerable history behind Arabic styles of script such as Kufic, Naskh, Thuluth and Diwanii. Of these, Naskh is the most widely used style of Arabic script in newspapers, magazines, promotional materials and adverts while Thuluth remains important as an ornamental scripts, used for calligraphic titles and inscriptions.

For even more on the history of Arabic typesetting, I enjoyed reading about one of the first books printed in the Middle East with an Arabic typeface. A fascinating historical read, the article identifies why Gutenberg’s press was not widely adopted in the Middle East:

“Arabic letters are generally not written separately but joined to each other in groups or entire words, like a script typeface in English. And though the Arabic alphabet has only 28 letters, most letters have four forms, depending on whether they occur at the beginning of the word, in the middle of the word, at the end of the word, or stand alone.

Furthermore, each combination of letters is unique, creating a typographic challenge greater than Chinese. Because all letters connect dynamically with the preceding one, and most also with the following one, the number of unique combinations is almost astronomical.”

Of course, none of this background reading is strictly necessary but by understanding the history of Arabic typesetting I believe we can strive to make our work of today that bit better and more sympathetic. What’s more, I think it’s fascinating stuff and hope you enjoy it too!

image: Clerkenwell Design Week

This annual shindig describes itself as:

“a festival celebrating design’s creative richness, its social impact and its power for change.

The festival programme of seminars, workshops and debates tackles key issues from a design standpoint. Big design names and inspirational thought leaders will spearhead an event crammed with left-field thinking, off-the-wall performances and presentations to challenge all your preconceptions.”

Yesterday I grabbed the chance to look round the newly opened concept store from Toto, the Japanese luxury bathroom brand, and further down St John Street indulged in some light gazing.

One of the great bonuses of working in our central London translation office is being able to nip out to such celebrations. I’ll be trying to attend at least some more events in the next couple of days to cast my translation eye over them. Design is after-all an international force, although one often coloured by local tastes and aesthetics.

The Southbank Centre is planning a five day event entitled Alchemy exploring the culture of India, its diaspora and its relationship to the UK. The festival will feature literature, dance, music, food, fashion and debates. This cultural masala was the first reason for the poster holding my attention. The sheer scope is illustrated by two of the events on the opening Wednesday: a debate entitled “India: global powerhouse? Is India the new America?” and a concert by the London Philharmonic playing works by Indian film composer AR Rahman. Events such as these are just one of reasons that living and working in central London can be a joy.

The poster also stayed in my mind for a design reason. The addition of a line above the word ALCHEMY invokes some of the more common Indian scripts. This device of hanging Roman letters from a line has been used many, many times to suggest “Indianness”.

Why is this? After all, there are many languages in India, and many scripts. [5] First, because Hindi – one of India’s two official languages (the other is English) – is written characters hanging from a horizontal bar. But there are hundreds of mother tongues spoken around India. In fact, the 2001 Census revealed there are 29 languages spoken natively by more than a million individuals.

The script used to write Hindi is Devanagari and it is also used for some other Indian languages, such as Marathi and Nepali, as well as Sanskrit (India’s counterpart to Latin). But many other Indian languages have their own scripts. So does my Londoner’s eye associate this horizontal with “Indian-ness” just because of Hindi? In fact, no. The horizontal bar is a feature shared by several different Indian scripts, such as Bengali and Punjabi. In general, the north Indian scripts deriving from Devanagari all have this horizontal bar (Gujarati and Oriya are exceptions). The scripts for south Indian languages such as Tamil, Malayalam and Telugu have a different origin – and no horizontal bar.

Finally, here is an interesting family tree of Indian scripts from Colorado State University:

And while I am writing an “in-house” blog about aesthetics, it would remiss not to mention WorldAccent’s wider multilingual design, typesetting and localisation services. Afterall, my continuing fascination with the world of foreign language is driven in part by working with such a wide range of businesses, governmental bodies, NGOs, institutions and other organisations.

So please read on … and why not let us know what you think about the site and what we should be talking about?

Designers would probably start thinking how about how the ‘O’ cleverly combines textual and visual representation to deliver a single message, as with this poster for The Simpsons Movie:

We, on the hand, tutted knowingly, thinking: that’s practically asking for translation problems. As soon as it’s translated, the text and graphic elements separate back out (the word for “movie” isn’t necessarily going keep that nice O in the middle).

That doesn’t mean there aren’t ways around the problem. Here’s a French version of The Simpsons Movie poster:

Here, the doughnut is the O in ‘Simpsons’, a word which stays the same in the French translation. The doughnut motif would have been harder to incorporate if ‘Simpsons’ did not contain an O, but this is a nice sleight of hand and an elegant localisation. As a side note, we particularly liked the fact Lisa is pictured reading Victor Hugo.

The same trick could be used even in parts of Europe where the word ‘Simpsons’ varies slightly in translation. For instance, here is a Romanian translation of the poster:

What only the most avid fan might notice is that Homer is now clutching his doughnut with his left hand instead of his right. In fact, the whole image has been flipped to place the doughnut in the correct place to provide the O. Not a problem in Romania, but not a tactic you would want to use in cultures where eating with your left hand is taboo.

The unflipped version of the picture is used in a Portuguese version of the poster which simply separates the doughnut from the O.

But because of the layout, the Portuguese translation makes that second line look a little like “OO FILME” rather than “O FILME”. Still, not a big problem: Portuguese readers wouldn’t even link the doughnut with the O, because they know how “o filme” is spelt. Some might think the doughnut could have replaced the O in “o filme”, but this “o” means “the”. How odd would it look with “THE” as the largest element on the poster?

Of course, sometimes you simply have to let the text translation separate completely from the visual element. Here is a Korean translation of The Simpsons Movie poster, which just doesn’t have any nice doughnut-shaped letters to work with:

Does all this mean that designers should avoid such clever and innovative combination of letters and artwork? No, not at all. That would be overly restrictive on creativity. But The Simpsons poster is a fun example to show that if designers are using characters as graphic elements, they should think about the implications if their document is going to be translated. Even better, avoid painting yourself into a corner and ask for feedback from your translators at an early stage.

[NB: WorldAccent did not produce the above posters and they remain copyright of Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. They are pictured here only as an illustration of the issues that can be raised in translating graphic design]