Dabire Collective

Zeynab Izadyar's attempts for undergraduate thesis led to a thematic typeface design for the Iranian contemporary poet, Yadolah Royayee, along with typographic design with the Typeface for Royayee's book of poetry “70 Tomb Stone”. The typeface benefits from regulations of Naskh calligraphy and also borrows some visual aspect from Thuluth. The goal of the project was designing a typeface based on the poet's manifesto and repetitive use of words with different read, which is legible and can be used to typeset his poems. Due to the nature of the theme, the type face contains just letters and no digits. In her opinion, “letter” in a text, can play the visual role of word in a poem. Thus by making correspondence between the settings of “word place” in a poem with “letter figure” in a text, a specific typeface for Royayi and his poems was designed, by which the weigh, music, emphasis and relations in the established rhythm in text can be expressed. Various ideas applied in the acquired rhythm are: first, the design focuses on the negative space of some letters having hole, such as [ه], [م], [ق], [ف] and [و] in the way that the form of the circular part of the letter and the form of the hole are similar. Second, negative spaces of the upper parts of some letters such as [ع] or [غ] and also teeth of [س] and [ش] are coordinated with repetitive circular forms of letters with hole. At last, the negative and positive spaces of other letters having hole, such as [ص], [ج] and [ط] families, or the ones who do not have hole but the inside vacancy is almost the same, such as [ک], are equiponderated.

Ultimately, she selectively designed some of the poems of the “70 Tomb Stone”, which drags the viewers directly or indirectly to the other dimension.