Shabtai is a typeface I designed in a type design course led by Michal Sahar during my studies at Bezalel. I began working on the typeface about a year before the course, with the help of Oded Ezer, who guided me to study the skeletons of classic Hebrew typefaces. The skeletons help in understanding the structure of the script, and inspired by them I designed a skeleton of my own. When I started the course with Michal I “dressed” my skeleton in calligraphy. The new skeleton I created is a tribute to the carved Herodian script, which can be seen in Ada Yardeni’s “The Book of Hebrew Script” or in a post by the Typographic Bureau by Yeronimus.
Skeleton research on the right, the new skeleton I created on the left
The design process – from calligraphy to letter
With a nib and a transparency I went over the skeleton and “poured” movement into it. The intention was not to make beautiful calligraphy, but to see what comes out of tracing the skeleton. I treated the structure of the skeleton as drawing instructions and examined what forms in the strokes and meetings of the ink.
Doing calligraphy teaches intuitively how a letter is formed (or can be formed). After enough sheets and ink I looked at the letters and marked interesting places, such as the meetings that form, the serifs that form, the changing stroke width of the broad nib and more. I scanned the results and converted them to vector format.
I began the process of turning the calligraphy into a typeface. You can stop at several stages in this process, and at each stage you get a different typeface. We can stop at early stages and get a headline face with a strong calligraphic character, or continue and stop when we get a text face that echoes calligraphy.
I wanted to reach the end of the second path, and unfortunately one semester was not enough for me to design a text face. I continued the design of Shabtai a year later in my graduation project and turned it into a text typeface now called “Days״.
Because I was aiming for a text face, I spent most of the course reducing the movements and creating a set of letters that can function in sentences and not only as a headline letter. The process of turning calligraphy into a typeface is an experiment in thinning the calligraphic features without losing the calligraphic idea.
After the course I kept working on Shabtai and designed an additional weight for emphasis, and it is available to buy on the site. Unlike its little brother “Days”, Shabtai is a typeface with a strong traditional presence; it is in an excellent weight for setting headlines, and the attention given to the design of the letters makes it a wonderful letter for Hebrew branding and logotypes.
