Did you know that there are only two Urdu Nastaliq typefaces available on Google Fonts? Meet Dr Izadpanah, the Iranian who Designed an Urdu Typeface, Gulzar.
Dr. Borna Izadpanah hails from Tehran, and learnt Nastaliq in early childhood at primary school.
He had a long-time dream: to design a Nastaliq typeface. He began working on it in 2019, for Gulzar.
Gulzar is an Urdu Nastaliq typeface and the only one in the world which has a Latin counterpart to type Romanised Urdu.
One of the reasons for the lack of Nastaliq typefaces, despite being the first choice of script for Urdu publications is that the script is complicated.
In the font Gulzar, ب has 20 different variations alone, because each letter form changes upon which letter it is connecting to. Moreover, the letters do not follow a straight baseline.
Dr Izadpanah is a Lecturer in Typography & Graphic Communication at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. He has also conducted a lot of research into the history of written and printed Persian texts in South Asia.
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