Arek is Rosetta’s award-winning type family covering Latin and Armenian. The design draws on extensive research in traditional manuscripts, exploring and emphasising the distinctive, calligraphic roots of Armenian. The highly original cursive style breaks new ground in Armenian typography for the digital age, offering an original secondary style for distinction and widening the existing sylistic repertoire. Details such as serifs and terminal styles are shared between Latin and Armenian.
The visual harmony is enhanced by common vertical proportions, and the modest x-height in the Latin is sensitively engineered alongside the Armenian. Originally designed for school books, Arek equips the typographer with ten styles covering a wide range for editorial and other challenging typesetting environments. The family also provides expert features such as ligatures, lining and ranging figures, and contextual alternates.
Designed by: Khajag Apelian
Published: 2012
Language support:
Armenian (1 language)
Latin (119 languages)
Khajag Apelian is a Lebanese graphic and type designer of Armenian descent. Raised between Dubai and Beirut, Khajag received a bachelor’s degree in Typography and Motion Graphics from Notre Dame University in Lebanon, and an M.Des. in Type and Media from KABK in The Hague.
Khajag worked in branding with Landor Associates, Dubai, before starting his career as a freelancer under “debakir” in the Netherlands in 2009. Debakir focused on Arabic typography projects with various organisations such as Opera Amsterdam, One/one, the Mediamatic Foundation, and the Khatt Foundation. In 2010 Khajag co-founded — together with Lara Balaa — Majooun, a visual communication and type design studio based in Beirut.
| Post-production : | David Březina |
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The multidisciplinary festival Multiple Memories focuses on the cultural issues of migration. The editorial design and visual identity by JAC design studio uses Arek by Khajag Apelian.
Photos by Hannes Woidich.
Specimens are boring! Creative minds don’t want to just look at pretty pictures, they want to draw their own stuff in the first place. So we talked to our friend, famous Czech book designer Martin Pecina (aka Typolenin) and he came up with a dos-à-dos sketchbook/primer with ten short texts on typographic refinements everyone should know about (small caps, case-sensitive punctuation, figures, ligatures, kerning, optical sizes, stylistic sets, swashes, contextal alternates, non-Latin scripts). Simple coloured glue binding, emboss, and pink colour. Martin’s sketches on type, your sketches of type.
You can buy it in the merchandise section.
2012 officially marked “Five Centuries of Armenian Printing”, and an anniversary book ‘The Diaspora of Armenian Printing 1512-2012’ was published. The book commemorates the printers, their books, and their printing types from the first book printed in Venice to the present day. For technical and political reasons, all Armenian books were printed outside Armenia until 1771. The book was written by John A. Lane, a well-known historian of printing types, and contains a wealth of excellent illustrations. It accompanied the exhibition “The diaspora of the Armenian Book 1512-2012”, held at the Special Collections Library of the University of Amsterdam and at the National Library of Armenia in Yerevan.
The Armenian is set in Arek by Khajag Apelian, the English is set in Arnhem by Fred Smeijers. It was meticulously designed by Frederik de Wal.
Yerevan magazine is an Armenian periodical published in English and Russian since 2005, and in Armenian since summer 2011 (now terminated). Art-directors: Gegham Vardanyan, Arsen Kirakosyan. Arek features in the magazine headlines and text. Notably, both variants, the upright as well as the cursive Armenian, are used. It is particularly interesting to see how the designers made use of this unprecedented apparatus in Armenian typography.
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