Together with friends outside our home in Gidole, Ethiopia

Ethiopic Typeface Design

This article will serve as an introduction and is the first of a series about the creation of my own Ethiopic typeface.

Background

I have no design education and started creating my first font — a sans serif called Gidole — a year ago and the process has been somewhat like this:

1. Pick a one I liked (DIN)
2. Find inspiration in other fonts (Clear Sans, San Francisco, Roboto etc.) and look at how they are drawn, the dimensions etc.
3. Start drawing and make it open source
4. Get feedback + help from some extremely helpful people online
5. Continue to improve and expand it to cover more languages with great help as e.g. seen in the cyrillic github issue

People are much more inclined to help you when it’s an open source project

Ethiopia

I grew up in Ethiopia so I wanted to create a typeface in an effort to contribute to a rich and friendly culture which has given me so much. Ethiopia is the worlds 13th biggest country with an estimated 92 million people (wiki). It is unfortunately also 10–15th from the bottom on the list of GDP per capita (wiki).

Amharic

Amharic አማርኛ is the official language in Ethiopia and has around 22 million native speakers (wiki). Around 0.0007% of the internet is in Amharic including some 13.000 articles on wikipedia (w3techs.com og wiki).

I haven’t been able to find the number of sites — like this article — in English with some Amharic in them but I expect that number to be a lot bigger since all classes in Ethiopian secondary school are in English and typing Amharic on a computer can be a bit difficult. A quick Google search for selam ሰላም (hello/peace) gave ~350.000 results.

(If you don’t see an extra space or maybe some ��� after e.g. “selam” above then it’s because no Amharic font is installed on your system. I’m especially dissapointed in the fact that iOS9 still doesn’t support the language of the worlds 13th biggest country)

Fidels

The characters used to write Amharic are called fidäls ፊደል (aka Ge’ez script).

All fidäls are consonant+vowel pairs and depending on how you count there are around 250 of them (all not shown in the chart).

The is a system so that the basic letter-shape is the consonant and the “flag” is the vowel e.g.:

An H shape is “z” and a flag in the middle to the right is “u” so ዙ is “zu”.

If you take my name Andreas እንድርያስ it’s actually pronounced ʔə·nə·də·rə·ja·sə where “ə” is pronounced like “a” in about, “e” in taken, “i” in pencil etc… it’s the most common vowel sound in many languages including Amharic and English (wiki).

Getting started

Since there aren’t that many (good) Amharic fonts my process has been more experimental and less mimicking but I still started by looking for inspiration in my old albums and online of images of signs, labels etc.

The coca cola logo is a childhood favourite.

Existing Fonts

I then searched for existing Amharic fonts and the only latinised/modern version of the amharic script I have found is Noto. I can’t say that much positive about it but note that some of the odd letters can be explained by the font being inspired by handwriting with a pencil and not a brush.

The two prettiest Amharic fonts in my book are Nyala and Abyssinica SIL but they are both — as most Amharic fonts — fairly calligraphic with high contrast and lots of detail. This is why e.g. Nyala is 444kb which is a lot for a font with 912 characters. In comparison Gidole is currently 83kb and has 888 characters.

My Font

I want the fidäls to match the latin letters in Gidole which is a minimal and slightly geometric sans serif. This means I can’t use Nyala and Abyssinica for direct inspiration but they serve as great guidelines for overall shapes, dimensions, angles, proportions etc.

The First Letters

I learned reading and writing in the local kindergarten but moved to a Scandinavian boarding school at 7 where we weren’t really taught Amharic.

So I forgot how to read and write but I know how the fidäls should look and one of the words I remember seeing most is my own name so I started drawing that. The fidäls in my name are also diverse which meant I had to make quite a few design choices that other letters will also incoorporate.

I will talk about those design choices in the next post(s) and for now just show you a couple of “old” sketches anda comparison with other fonts.

Notice the bolder weight and more minimal “flags” compared to the current version below.

The End

I hope you enjoyed reading it. Please don’t hesitate to ask and come with suggestions. Once I start churning out letters I will be updating this GitHub issue for feedback and more.

You can follow me on Medium, GitHub and/or on Twitter for updates.