I had wanted to draw one more variable typeface for a long time, an Armenian neo-grotesque. I started it back in 2021, got round to finishing it only in 2026.

The job turned out to be a wide one, especially at the research and the kerning.

Stylistic decisions

Armenian setting carries far more above and below the x-height than Latin or Cyrillic setting does. In an average text about 60% of the letters have an ascender or a descender; in Latin setting that is about 30%, in Cyrillic setting about 10%. Extenders make text harder to lay out, especially with tight leading. A word of letters at one height looks like a rectangle, a line of them like a band. Extenders break that shape.

In traditional Armenian type 32 of the 39 lowercase signs leave the x-height.

To redraw them I went through my own library and found what I needed in two books: Vahagn Vermishyan's New Armenian Canonical Typefaces (2011 edition) and Karapet Tiraturyan's Armenian Writing (1963).

In the end I chose these ten signs: զ, թ, ծ, հ, ձ, յ, շ, չ, ջ, ֆ.

Type styles

The typeface was built as two things: variable, with a single weight axis running from 300 to 700, and static, with five styles from Light to Bold for every place a variable font still cannot go.

OpenType features

The typeface has five OpenType features. They solve general typographic problems as well as problems specific to Armenian setting.

Rlig and Liga join letters that should read as one glyph. Calt swaps shapes that would otherwise collide. Case raises punctuation for all-caps text, and Tnum gives every figure the same width for tables.

Kerning is not on that list. It is the baseline of any typeface rather than an extra, and it is done in full: 333 classes and 7 419 pairs, tuned for each weight.

Below, each feature is shown in more detail. Every example comes with the rule behind it, taken from the font and cut down to that one case. The rules are written in the OpenType feature file syntax (FEA).

feature rlig {
  sub ա ՛ by ա՛;
} rlig;

feature calt {
  sub ե՞' խ by ե՞.up;
} calt;

feature calt {
  sub Ա' բ by Ա.alt;
} calt;

feature case {
  sub hyphen by hyphen.uc;
} case;

feature liga {
  sub մ խ by ﬗ;
} liga;

feature tnum {
  sub one by one.tnum;
} tnum;

Barev Yerevan 2021 →