Khatt Chronicles in Conversation with Naima Ben Ayed

Yara Khoury Nammour interviews French-Tunisian type and graphic designer Naïma Ben Ayed. They start the conversation discussing Naïma's serendipitous journey into type design. They discuss her postgraduate studies at École Estienne in Paris and the type design student project (initiated by the Islamic Art Department of the Louvre Museum in Paris) that introduced her to Arabic type design. This project was seminal for her career during which she was introduced to the Khatt Foundation's first "Typographic Matchmaking" project that continued to inspire her work throughout her career.Typographic Matchmaking resonated with her preoccupation with expressing her dual identity and how it was manifestated in her design work. Naima then discusses her type design work in general and her finding inspiration in North African scripts and visual culture, as well as stories in hidden archives, namely in feminist print archives from the SWANA region. Next to her commissioned projects, she conducts her own research for her personal type design projects. She elaborates on her "personal" typeface design project La Grotesque, based on the Arabic Maghribi style and translating this style to a modern and low contrast font family. She explains how this project was a continuation of her research and typeface design for the Khatt Foundation's "Typographic Matchmaking in the Maghrib" project. Naima then goes on to discuss the challenges and limitations of creating Arabic companions for Latin font family. She discusses her TCD Award winning text typeface for 29LT typefoundry, Azahar, for which she designed the Arabic character set. Naima and Yara discuss the parameters of Arabic type design pedagogy, where it overlaps and where it differs from Latin type design pedagogy, and the need to develop a hand-ons workbook that introduces the field to beginners. They conclude with the statement that we "need to build up and build collectively" [the field of Arabic type design].