El Messiri - Google Fonts

About

El Messiri is a modern Arabic typeface family designed by Mohamed Gaber (Arabic) that began with Jovanny Lemonad's Latin and Cyrillic typeface Philosopher. The Arabic started with the concept of a curvy Arabic typeface inspired by the beauty of Naskh and drawn as if with a brush instead of the traditional bamboo pen. The idea took form with wide counters that improve readability at smaller text sizes, and has subtle details that make it a great display face at larger sizes. El Messiri current comes in 4 weights (Light, Regular, SemiBold and Bold) and the Arabic component has a wide glyph set that supports the Arabic, Farsi and Urdu languages.

The font has been upgraded to a variable font with a weight axis (Regular to Bold) in August 2021.

To contribute, see github.com/Gue3bara/El-Messiri

Designers

Mohamed Gaber

Mohamed Gaber (Cairo, 1986) is a type designer and artist based in Amsterdam. His primary interest lies in the haptic nature of type production and its technological, philosophical, and historical aspects. He holds a Master in design from Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam). He has founded Kief Type Foundry (a type foundry specialising in open-source Arabic fonts), TypePlatform (a research space for under-represented writing systems focusing on Arabic script), and co-founded TypeLab at Sandberg Instituut (an open platform to experiment with typography). He taught as a guest tutor at AUC (Egypt), VCU (Qatar), and Linnaeus University (Sweden). In addition, he often gives workshops and talks around the world. His type design work is featured on Google fonts, and his artworks were exhibited in DDW (UAE), CTM 2020 (Germany), Venice Biennale 2020 (Italy), MK&G-Hamburg (Germany), Mediamatic (Netherlands), and VCU (Qatar). His work was nominated for the Jameel Art Prize in 2013 and awarded Best Arabic Display font from Granshan in 2016.

gaber.design | Instagram

Jovanny Lemonad