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Comment by yunruse | Hacker News Reader

My favourite script has to be Square Kufic [0]. The pixel-like design is abstract and utterly gorgeous on architecture.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kufic#Square_Kufic

Yes, it is also close to versace square pattern fret or Greek pattern :"Greek key, also referred to as meander, is in its most basic form a linear pattern. The design is made up of a long, continuous line that repeatedly folds back on itself, mimicking the ancient Maeander River of Asia Minor with its many twists and turns. Homer mentions the river in “The Iliad,” and it is believed that the meander motif symbolizes infinity or the eternal flow of things. (In fact, the word “meander” is derived from the 250-mile-long snaking Maeander, known today as the Menderes, which flows through southwestern Turkey.) What is most astonishing about the meander motif is that it is found in the architecture, sculpture and decorative arts of many early civilizations — civilizations that could not possibly have known or seen one another’s artifacts. It seems that those cultures, independent of one another, created their own version of the motif.

I had an almost end of life experience and the final moment about to happen was accompanied by a feeling of euphoria and had a vanishing point the single path meander motif pattern was spiralling toward.

I’m also a fan of Kufic engraving, like on this 13th century astrolabe https://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/astrolabe/catalogue/backReport/Astr...

Square kufic is awesome, I used it to design my personal website's "logo" https://muattiyah.com/

What tools did you use to design that logo?

inkscape iirc :) At the time I wanted a tool that would typeset text I write into geometric kufic and have some parameters that one can tune to e.g. control curvature, colors, ...etc but it'd have been too big of a bikeshed.

Wow. Those patterns never clicked as writing to me. The Shahada example is so cool.

The information on the Kufic hafsids resembles the TLV patterning on bronze mirrors. Wonder if there is an information density measure per square area for these things. QR-codes have builtin information redundancy in case parts of the pattern deteriorate.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TLV_mirror

I love the aesthetic as well.

I’m curious, how readable is this to a native Arabic reader? Is it easy to read fluently or does it take some processing?

Not a native reader, using my acquired reading knolwdge. It takes a lot of processing for me, no idea where to start, had to look for each letter and still couldn't find a few. So great as a design, quite poor for readability.

I have no idea what it says, I can tell it is arabic but no idea where to start reading

Square Kufic is easy to read for native readers when you add diacritical marks and keep the general order along a path. You'll often see words or phrases repeated or flipped to make cool geometric designs, which is easy to spot for native readers but often confusing for others.

The Reem Kufi font [0] is even easier to read and rather popular on trendy Arabic websites and publications.

[0] https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Reem+Kufi

I see that font a lot at arabic restaurants here in LA.

What is the relation between the square font and Reem Kufi?

The pixelated font is called square kufic. Kufic script in general is very angular as opposed to flowing, think monospace font vs cursive. You see this in classical mosaics as well as modern decorated buildings, having the straight/right-angle thing going on is either more complementary for being part of the architecture or is a material constraint of having square tile to work with or trying to make sure you're applying the text to the building in a way that is "plumb square".

So Reem Kufic is a modern font that has the same goal as the classical, square kind.

Reading is like a solving a puzzle. Definitely not easy.

I'm a native reader, was never able to understand it

As a Non-Arabic the aesthetics looks like the colorscheme from Borland IDE's for DOS, such as Turbo Pascal and Turbo C.

As a non-Arabic-reader it looks really stylish to me - like on the Iraqi flag

That's no accident.

It's named for the city of Kufa in modern-day Iraq.

I was giving an example of one of the things I liked in particular. Text on a flag to me is usually a no-no but in Iraq’s case it works (and Iran’s too, but a bit more subtle). Sorry I should’ve been clearer :-)

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