fedra tifinagh™.
designing for the neo-tifinagh alphabet.




Inspired by the work of students at the ANRT in Nancy, France, as well as professional type designers around the world focusing on underrepresented scripts, I undertook the project of developing a font for the Tifinagh alphabet.  Largely considered a "resurrected" alphabet, Tifinagh is used to write several North African Berber languages, including Amazigh (the most widely-spoken indigenous language of the region) and its variants and sister languages, such as Tachelhit (also called "Chleuh") and Tarafit, as well as the Touareg language spoken in eastern Algeria and throughout parts of Libya.

My font is intended to serve as the Tifinagh extension of the Fedra™ font family, developed by the Dutch firm Typothèque.  One of Typothèque's missions and greatest successes has been its devotion to adapting its font families to the Arabic script; Fedra™ is one of the fonts that is available in the Arabic script as well as Latin.

Given that the Neo-Tifinagh (i.e. the iteration of the Tifinagh script currently in use throughout North Africa) alphabet was originally developed in and for the Moroccan multilingual context, I elected to seek out a font family that already covered the scripts of Morocco's two other national and official languages (French and Arabic, respectively using the Latin and Arabic scripts) to which I would add a character set for the Tifinagh script.  And thus Fedra™ Tifinagh was born: an aesthetic extension of an existing font family with a clean, yet inspired, ethos, based in both the Swiss graphic design tradition that has been so influential in the evolution of sans-serif fonts, and the specificities of Tifinagh lettering.

sample text: UNDHR

ⵉⵎⴷⴰⵏⴻⵏ, ⴰⴽⴽⴻⵏ ⵎⴰ ⵍⵍⴰⵏ ⵜⵜⵍⴰⵍⴻⵏ ⴷ ⵉⵍⴻⵍⵍⵉⵢⴻⵏ ⵎⵙⴰⵡⴰⵏ ⴷⵉ ⵍⵃⵡⴻⵕⵎⴰ ⴷ ⵢⵉⵣⴻⵔⴼⴰⵏ-ⵖⵓⵔ ⵙⴻⵏ ⵜⴰⵎⵙⴰⴽⵡⵉⵜ ⴷ ⵍⴰⵇⵓⴻⵍ ⵓ ⵢⴻⵙⵙⵢⴼⴽ ⴰⴷ-ⵜⵉⵍⵉ ⵜⴻⴳⵎⴰⵜⵜ ⴳⴰⵔ ⴰⵙⴻⵏ.

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