Diversity Type Project: Fatima Abbas

posted by Robyn Pitts May 25, 2021

To celebrate World Diversity Day, we’ve teamed up with Distillery to launch Diversity Type; a font that includes contributions from a total of 308 creatives from 54 countries, creating the the world’s most diverse typeface. Below, we chat with Fatima Abbas, who contributed the design for the letters ‘G’ and ‘Y’.

Based in Sudan, Fatima is currently a student of Graphic Design at Virginia Commonwealth University, Qatar. As a child, she would watch her Father sketching out portraits and landscapes, and practising calligraphy. Today, Fatima sketches in a similar vain, drawing different scenes around her as well re-imagining the popular news stories that her father would draw when she was a child.

“Drawing is an essential part of my practice, especially now in type design, it’s a great way to start exploring the letterform and experiment with different features before digitizing them…”

“As a young student in graphic design, I’m always interested in type in general, but I never thought that one day I will be that much interested in the type design world,” comments Fatima. The letters she submitted to the Diversity type call out were the outcome of a recent school project about exploring type design; a project that introduced her to the world of type. The design started with extensive research into typefaces of both past and present, and then moved into the design phase with sketches in markers and pens that experimented with the potential of each letterform. “I was able to build a complete set of lower and upper case letters inspired by botanical aspects in the shoulders and crossbars, besides having some blackletter spirit due to the tide letterform and the thickness of the strokes,” says Fatima.

Currently, Fatima is further developing the font, which she has named Brier, by adding numbers and punctuation. She is also working on developing more of “blackletter spirit” into it, aiming for better legibility without getting rid of its main botanical features.

After designing her first typeface, Fatima has become “super intrigued by the type design world” and hopes to dive deeper into it, collaborate with other creatives, and explore creating type in her native language of Arabic.