Designing in Urdu.
June 6, 2021
This workbook page shows how a designer must manually attempt to block out surrounding letters to depict how an Urdu letter is written when at the beginning and middle of a word.
Currently, one of my projects is designing workbooks and other school materials for a 2nd to 12th grade Urdu language curriculum. I’ve been creating this project on Adobe InDesign, but one of the challenges with a script like Urdu is that it is written from right to left rather than left to right, like English. In addition to this characteristic, Urdu has a calligraphic feature. When written in the traditional Nastaliq style, Urdu words and letters are written at an iconic angle or slant. Nastaliq is considered one of the most beautiful calligraphic styles in the world. It was meticulously and technically designed based on the point size of the writing utensil:
Keeping the meticulousness of the pen size in mind, it is no surprise that it would be a challenge to master code that could remake its exact look.
In English, these words I am currently typing are all on the same horizontal line, and each line height takes up the same pre-determined range of space. In the image below, the word "flower" all fits within the straight blue and red lines. However with Urdu, you may have some letters that need a lot of vertical space and some letters that need less.
The word "phool" (flower in Urdu) consists of only 4 letters:
ل + و + ھ + پ
However, one of those letters (و) is what is called a non-connector which means it does not connect to the letter proceeding it, as per Nastaliq Urdu's rules. To further complicate things, Nastaliq requires that the non-connector letter and the isolated letter proceeding it must have the base writing line (the red line) cutting through them. In order to achieve this unique style, I had to write this one word as two separate text boxes. One with the first three letters and one with the isolated letter to ensure there wasn’t a large space gap in the middle of the word.
Due to these challenges, there are not many Urdu fonts to choose from or even download that can attempt to resolve some of these difficulties. As seen in the image above, there are many fonts that look more similar to Arabic where the letters are horizontally even and on the same lines. However, this masks the true identity of Nastaliq Urdu.
Although a tedious process, after working through these design challenges you are left with text that is as clear and beautiful as written Nastaliq Urdu calligraphy.
Taking in all the challenges of designing in Urdu and trying to create a workbook for beginners has allowed for quite a lot of trial and error. I’ve learned that some Urdu letters will almost always need its vertical scale taken down a few percentage points. I’ve also accepted that my vocabulary charts cannot all look identical because of Urdu’s natural slant that is unique to each word, but I’ve grown to realize that that’s not wrong. That’s what allows Urdu to be so unique.
Perhaps it's an “eastern-style” of design that needs to be explored more. The differences in chart box sizes, font sizes, and slants of a word are what make Urdu its own special language and I’ve learned to embrace that this does not need to follow the same document setup as an entirely English document. If programs and products were designed with keeping other languages and audiences in mind, it may not be as challenging or time consuming to create such resources in less commonly taught languages. It would also give these languages avenues to thrive and develop rather than struggle to be used. Similarly to what I try to achieve when designing these Urdu workbooks, the inclusivity would provide a way for newer generations to get to explore their culture through the field of design.
Read more about Urdu typefaces and scripts: