Seeb

website: seebfont.com

Click here for my inspiration presentation (pdf)

I made a font. Yes, I made the entire thing from scratch with a calligraphy pen, scanned into Illustrator and finetuned in TypeTool. It was for a Typeface Design class I took with Greg Van Alstyne in the fall semester of my last year at OCAD. I originally had no idea what I was doing. The idea to make a hybrid font emerged as the assignment progressed.

In the early stages, we were asked to write our name in three different styles. Since my name is a Farsi name and difficult for non-Iranians to pronounce in its original form, I got tempted to write it in a way where English speaking audience could learn to pronounce it the Farsi way. It started there, and then I went nuts in trying to carry that out in the entire alphabet. The class had no idea what I was doing and where I was going with the final product. Greg was extremely encouraging and lenient with my ambitious pursuit.

Seeb font is an experiment combining two alphabets using the phonetics and gestural elements that create Farsi and English. Its main purpose is to familiarize the English speaker with the sounds and consonants that are not used in English. My vision was to create an interactive experience that made it easier to understand the relationship between the spoken and writen word.

And if you don't know by now, that's the font used for my name/logo for this site.

I'm thinking of tweaking it up at some point and putting it up for sale on PayPal. Keep reminding me to do it!