Lajmi, Amir (2025) Connecting Types: A Hybrid Approach towards Cross-Cultural Typography. Masters thesis, Concordia University.
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Abstract
To work with Arabic and Latin on the same surface is to enter a space that is never singular, where more than one rhythm, more than one reading direction, and more than one history insist on being seen. This research creation begins from that tension and from my own life as a trilingual designer, moving daily between Arabic, French, and English. It asks how the graphic integration of Arabic and Latin typography can open new paths for cross cultural communication, how such work is received by Arabic speaking and Western readers, and how
typographic dialogue between scripts might help navigate the frictions that mark relations between East and West.
Rather than separating thinking from making, I let them grow together. I study existing bilingual works and gather insights through secondary research, then return to the page and the screen, drawing and composing until the questions surface within the forms themselves. Across three stages, I first develop hybrid letters that merge Arabic and Latin pairs with shared phonetic sounds, then shape bilingual words that are translatable and untranslatable where balance,
emphasis, and hierarchy are continually renegotiated, and animate the untranslatable words by allowing them to scatter, gather, and move through time and space. I then move to the setting of longer bilingual texts and poems, working first on the page itself through layout, alignment, spacing, and hierarchy before extending the inquiry into motion at the end of the process as a way to test how bilingual rhythm and meaning shift when carried through movement.
The outcome is not a single system, but a family of situated typographic strategies in which neither script is absorbed by the other and translation is approached as partial and porous.
Letters, words, pages, and motion compositions work together to hold cultural differences in a readable tension. In this way, the thesis offers bilingual typography as both critical lens and poetic practice for meeting, speaking, and seeing across scripts and cultures.
| Divisions: | Concordia University > Faculty of Fine Arts > Design and Computation Arts |
|---|---|
| Item Type: | Thesis (Masters) |
| Authors: | Lajmi, Amir |
| Institution: | Concordia University |
| Degree Name: | M.A. |
| Program: | Design |
| Date: | 5 December 2025 |
| Thesis Supervisor(s): | Yuen-Kit Lo, Kevin |
| Keywords: | Cross-Cultural Design, Typography, Colonization, Arabic Aesthetics, Language Sovereignty |
| ID Code: | 996620 |
| Deposited By: | Amir Lajmi |
| Deposited On: | 29 Jun 2026 15:02 |
| Last Modified: | 29 Jun 2026 15:02 |
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