29LT Oskura shares a lot of common ground with its sibling 29LT Okaso, overall vertical metrics, weight distribution, some common thoughts and even forms.

Where 29LT Okaso is the more geometric and strict echo to the Aljamiado manuscripts 29LT Oskura is home to the lively and fluid forms.

Both typefaces can be used standing alone or together. 29LT Oskura has the inbuilt possibility to serve as an Upright Italic companion featuring alternate forms with Italic construction and narrower proportions for a range of letters.

29LT Oskura uses ligatures to come closer to the Arabic. Big thanks go out to Ondrej Jób for the wonderful database Context of diacritics, without it I’d probably still be stuck drawing.

Arabic as a script is a lot more diverse in vertical heights than our restricted Latin. As 29LT Oskura is based on handwritten sources, I was wondering, if the Latin could also behave a little more unexpected without breaking the overall formalness. If the capital letters could do something similar to what our so-called old style numbers do. Not the shrinking part, even though small caps are the best species, but the downward shift.

There might be cases where it’s preferable to have the option of shifting the Caps down, either to live up to the many generous Arabic descenders, that we lack in Latin, or if you have a text with a lot of Caps and want to hide them. But as this is so unusual to our eyes, they attract maybe even more attention. It’s fun to turn the feature on and off in any case.

The ligature project then kept growing from there into another unexpected direction. Shifted caps ligatures!

29LT Oskura and 29LT Okaso got a slanted sibling. We wondered if it was possible to find one style that could fit both the geometric and the fluid poles of the project. Merging forms from both families to bridge the differences, slanting plus a slight rotation seem to do it for the Latin part.

It’s complete (for now). With a geometric, a fluid and a slanted version in seven weights and a richness of extra features.

29LT Oskura
Collaboration with Pascal Zoghbi
Retail typeface for 29 Letters Typefoundry
Published 2021