“The most important thing in an Arabic typeface is to maintain the illusion that one brushstroke wrote the whole word. When they connect, you need to feel that it's one single movement, but in reality these are very different characters that are just put side-by-side. If you don't have the logic of how to combine them and how to draw a curve that is actually cut in half and then put it together so that it looks like it's one curve, it becomes quite complicated.
“For example, the letter 'b' - which in Arabic is called ‘baa’. You have four forms for it: when it's isolated, when it's in the initial, in the middle, or the final position. But in this typeface, I had many, many different shapes. I had the initial ‘baa’, the normal, and then another one if it comes before a ‘miim’, another one if it comes before a ‘jiim’, another one it comes before a ‘raa’.
“It had to change and to take into consideration what comes after and what comes before. You start [creating] words, and then the words look funny, and then you redraw and you redraw until the word shapes start to look good. And finally you have that illusion that there is a continuous line connecting all of these different shapes.”