Design Concept
La Grotesque is an effort to create Arabic & Latin in collaboration, like a conversation among friends, like a meal you prepare together. La Grotesque is a fun summer trip from Marseille (France) to La Marsa (Tunisia) via Marsala (Italy), celebrating the interconnectedness of the Mediterranean triangle that forms our cultural heritages. The Latin script is rooted in the warm, rounded forms of early 20th century wood type sans serifs. Maghrebi seems to follow its own rules, with letterforms and proportions varying significantly from one manuscript to the other and even within the same page in an unconventional, somehow grotesque manner. This trait parallels with the early Latin sans serif from the 20th century, allowing us to see Maghrebi as the grotesque of Arabic calligraphic styles.
Emojis
To emphasise La Grotesque playful character and Mediterranean personality we incorporated emojis into the design to integrate more cultural narratives into the typeface. We added some of the essentials of Tunisian cuisine such as Harissa for the tin can emoji and the popular Tunisian bambalouni as the doughnut glyph. To give La Grotesque an authentic Italian touch we added the essential hand gestures and of course, a proper Margherita pizza instead of the American pepperoni!
Inclusivity
Bye Bye Binary had recently published their Typothèque containing their thorough research on the topic of Queer Unicode, finding typographic solutions to make inclusive glyphs in French and Italian languages. We decided to follow their approach and included a series of combined characters and symbols accessible simply by activating the ligature feature and typing masculine - centred dot - feminine word ending.
Authors
La Grotesque was designed by Naïma Ben Ayed (Arabic) and Francesca Bolognini (Latin) between 2022 and 2024.
