The Reed and the Cursor

A cut reed nib produces thick and thin because of how it is held, not because a designer decided so. Brush scripts across Arabic, Japanese and Ottoman traditions encode the hand, the angle and the speed of the person writing.

Six type designers were given access to calligraphers working in those traditions and asked to build variable typefaces that keep the logic rather than trace the shapes. The result is shown as specimen, as source, and as a set of honest failures, including two axes that had to be abandoned because they flattened the very thing being borrowed.

All six families are released under an open licence, with the calligraphers credited as co-authors and paid a share of the licensing income.