Mirjam Somers
Mirjam Somers was educated at St Joost Art Academy in Breda, the Netherlands, where she had lessons of the calligraphers Chris Brand and Jan van den Bouwhuysen. After two years she continued at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and graduated there in 1974 in Architectural Design. Having worked as a carpenter and free-lance typographer she encountered Arabic script in 1982 when together with Thomas Milo she designed and produced the Arabic Letter Box, a wooden prototype of a computer program and an educational tool at once. With Tom she reduced the traditional Arabic Ruqah script to 70 penstrokes and defined a mechanism to generate all and any letter combinations correctly: the smart font algorithm. The combination of the font-in-the-box and the out-of-the-box font inspired Peter Somers to write revolutionary smart font program code. Only after this first feat Peter, Mirjam and Thomas incorporated DecoType in 1985 – Designers of Computer-aided Typography. Mirjam played a major role in designing the Naskh typeface (1993-2004), and created the Emiri (2004, a revival) and Nastaliq (2008-2010, an original analysis) typefaces. Her latest designs are a second Ruq`ah (2011) and an Eastern Nastaleeq (2012).
At ATypI 2013 Amsterdam Mirjam Somers will be speaking at:
- Technology designed for Arabic Wed 09 Oct 1125