As part of our long-term collaboration with the Japanese type foundry Morisawa, we developed Arabic, Devanagari and Thai typefaces for the multi-script project Clarimo UD. The challenge was to emphasize simplicity, readability, and to maintain the straightforward, businesslike style of the original.
About Multi-script Clarimo UD for Morisawa
Clarimo UD Arabic, Devanagari, Thai Standard, and Thai Modern are the result of a long-term collaboration between Rosetta and the Japanese type foundry Morisawa. Originally, Morisawa developed their impressive multi-script project Clarimo UD (then called UD Shin Go) as a part of their Universal Design series (UD) which emphasizes simplicity and readability. The support for Japanese scripts, simplified and traditional Chinese, and Korean was developed by Morisawa; the support for Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek was developed by Kent Lew. Rosetta created the Arabic, Devanagari, and Thai counterparts.
Clarimo UD offers a range of weights and italics. Thanks to clear, functional forms and contemporary character constructions, it performs well across different media. This makes it an ideal choice for marketing, branding, information design, and wayfinding. Taking cues from Clarimo UD Latin and Japanese, our goal was to provide wider language support while maintaining the type family’s straightforward, businesslike style across additional scripts.
Clarimo UD Arabic is a contemporary interpretation of Naskh, a conventional and highly readable calligraphic style. Large, open counters and clearly disambiguated characters significantly improve the reading experience of Arabic texts. The typeface supports the Arabic, Persian, and Urdu languages.
Clarimo UD Devanagari supports over 36 languages including Hindi, Marathi, and Nepali. It features an extensive set of conjuncts and half forms, which are used to automatically compose the syllables required by texts from the day-to-day to the scholarly. The design features prominent knots, large counters, and open loops to improve the distinctiveness of particular characters.
Comprehensive Thai language support is provided by two related families. Clarimo UD Thai Standard offers a traditional, looped character construction while Clarimo UD Thai Modern provides a more contemporary, simplified, ‘loop-less’ construction. Both come with italics.
For each of the scripts, we have provided proportional and tabular versions of numerals and a selection of Latin-script punctuation customized to work well with the corresponding script.
This project was developed over several years and continents by a team of designers each specialized in one of the included scripts. The Arabic was designed by Titus Nemeth. The Devanagari was designed by Vaibhav Singh and later adapted by Florian Runge for the revised Clarimo UD Latin. The Thai Standard was originally designed by Ben Mitchell and later adapted by Sasikarn Vongin who also added the Thai Modern. All fonts were engineered and produced in-house by Rosetta.