As members of the family of Arabic script users, we have its beauty in our hearts. Since beauty is the phenomenon of the experience of pleasure, it grows with time and sinks its roots in our affection. Its brightness lights our way, inspires our ambition and guides our path. We keep it as it is our immortal heritage.

We are always fascinated by its creativity, and enjoy the feeling of achievement and satisfaction that this brings about. This inspires us to create new ideas and new designs to express this creativity in new technologies.

Thus, we have progressed and armed with the beauty of the

Islamic heritage and Arabic script, which grew inside us as a source of inspiration.

This love is paired with all the art creations from around the world.

I am Hasan Abu Afash, a Moslem living in Gaza, Palestine. I work in various design fields including the Arabic font design. I have been inspired by the immigration of my family in 1948 from Salama, a village near Jaffa city.

I studied chemical engineering in Homs University in 1995.  In the middle of the last year of my higher education, I purchased my first personal computer and made my first stumbling steps in design learning to use CorelDraw. Coming back to Gaza and unable to find a job in my area of specialization, I found myself strongly attracted to the wider design world, and worked in designing advertisements for local projects. As time passed, I found myself increasingly interested in Arabic fonts and was strongly fascinated by some great designers as Hamed Al-Amady and Mohammed Hashem Al-Bagdady who published a booklet: "The Arabic Font Rules". This work touched my heart deeply.

I tried to learn the Nas’taliq while in Syria, but I couldn't progress with that because of my university studies. But this fondness for the Arabic script and typography drove me to study it when I returned to Gaza. The lack of tools, teachers, books and other resources hampered this dream, and this pushed me to learn to make my own fonts. I started with reconditioning existing fonts and then designed my first font in Corel Draw in 1999, later moving to the Fontographer program.

I moved fast to learn the professional design of the Arabic font through serious study, use of Internet and that help contacting famous people in this field. In 2001, I met a great man, the type designer Mamoun Sakkal, who helped me a lot. I learned much from him, and he remains very generous in extending me his advices and explanations: an excellent guide that bestowed up on me.

I cooperated with Mr. Sakkal and produced the OpenType font that I called "Hasan Al Quds". It was originally designed in 2000, and was entered in the TDC 2004 type design competition in the United States. Later, it was extended to support all the languages that use the Arabic writing system, supporting all the Arabic characters in the Unicode Standard 5. In 2004, it was further extended to five weights: Light, Regular, Medium, Bold and Extra Bold. The Hasan Al Quds fonts are licensed for sale through the Bitstream type library: http://www.bitstream.com/font_rendering/products/dev_fonts/arabic/

 In 2005, I participated in the first Linotype Arabic type design competition in Germany, entering a new traditional Kufi style type that I called "Hasan Hib" and achieved fifth place in the titling font category.

http://www.linotype.com/2704-19505/winners.html

Ambitions:

For a long time, my obsession has been to establish a website where I can present the work of great Arabic type designers, calligraphers and other lettering artists who positively contributed to our great Islamic heritage and still carrying the banner. I hope to document computerized Arabic typography and showcase the best makers of digital Arabic fonts, so that we can all learn from them. I hope also to present many tutorial articles to form a knowledge base for Arabic typography.