Font Designer – Hassan Sobhi Mourad

Hassan Sobhi Mourad was born 1942 in Syria.
1970 Graduation from Damascus University.
1974 M. A. Degree in Arabic Calligraphy.
Fonts: Hassan® (1996).

Hassan is a traditional-style Arabic text face designed by Mr. Hassan Sobhi Mourad, an experienced calligrapher and teacher of the art. First produced by the Linotype Design Studio (U.K.) as a PostScript font in 1993, the family is now available in OpenType format.

An individual Naskh style, Hassan cleverly combines elegant proportions ­ echoing an inscriptional Thuluth in its tall vertical stems and deeply rounded final jim and ain. The effect of verticality is enhanced by the tense, reined-in kerning strokes of ra and waw, the well-poised lam-alif, and the compactly drawn ligatures.

The broad-band strokes of Hassan Bold smooth some of the angularity and relax the tension apparent in the Light. The traditional-style ligatures are rendered with an easy flow.

Because of the economical character count, Hassan Light and Bold text may be headed by the compact titling styles in the range (Hisham, Mariam) as well as designs like Ahmed or Kufi which answer to the inscriptional qualities of Hassan. In addition to other uses, Hassan would be particularly suited to document text-setting

Hassan’s two OpenType weights include Latin glyphs from Janson Text® Roman, and Janson Text Bold, respectively, inside the font files, allowing a single font to set text in both most Western European and Arabic languages. The OpenType glyph ranges incorporate Basic Latin (Western CP 1252 Latin 1/ANSI and Macintosh US Roman) and the Arabic character set (CP 1256), which supports Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. The fonts include tabular and proportional Arabic, Persian, and Urdu numerals, as well as a set of tabular European (Latin) numerals.