Samir Sayegh’s typography revolution

Master calligrapher Samir Sayegh is renowned as the leading contemporary practitioner of one of the Arab world’s oldest art forms. A lifetime of creating modern art out of historic Arabic scripts and enlivening a cultural tradition that he believes had calcified by the 20th century has earned him the reverent moniker of «moallem,» or teacher, in the Middle Eastern art community.

He is less well known, but equally revered, for literally adopting this role in 1992, when he agreed to teach calligraphy to students at the American University of Beirut’s newly created school of graphic design.

Sayegh’s class spawned a new generation of typographers who were ashamed, inspired and mildly outraged by the aesthetic decline of Arabic script over the past two centuries, especially when juxtaposed with Latin fonts.

The desire to modernize Arabic typeface so it could co-exist on different, but equal footing, with Latin counterparts motivated Sayegh’s former students like Lara Assouad, Tarek Atrissi and Nadine Chahine to design the first new Arabic typefaces in decades. These young Turks of Arabic typography have all publicly credited Sayegh’s class as their inspiration to enter a field that had long been dominated by Westerners.

Samir Sayegh’s typography revolution

Source: www.dailystar.com.lb