ARAM
author: Jana Nikolić
I had the feeling I needed to do something in return for Mr. Saroyan. To thank him for a few bits of his written words I came across… That is how I decided to choose three of his 13 stories from the book “My Name is Aram” and turn them into separate books, making this my final project at the Faculty of Applied Arts in Belgrade. This was supposed to be a project that would combine my two majors, Type and Book Design.
The letters just emerged… There are those “Writing Tool Rush” days… I start to explore a few new pens, Japanese glitter markers, rubber brushes, Fs, Ms, for smooth surfaces, refillable… I absolutely love them all but I get stuck with one of them, making its tip bend with pressure in time, getting accustomed to my character just as I recognized its familiar character between the bunch of other writing tools. So you pair it with specific kind of paper you know so well. There are dozens of different kinds in my drawers and folders, humbly waiting for the opportunity to give their best.
So the letters just popped up! I knew right away this was going to be a typeface for “Aram”, it had the same atmosphere, it was purified, basic as I could see it fit, simple, clean, slightly bended lines, with my marker's blobs at the beginnings and at the ends of the strokes, written rather fast, actually at the regular handwriting pace. It has this warm family feeling that Saroyan always brings about, every sentence calms me down and makes me feel at home… like cinnamon, clove or cumin.
There were no badly written letters, they all fitted somehow, the characters were entities in themselves but worked fabulously together, words and sentences twinkled together making the text feel light and alive, and also well handled and controlled.
When there was a whole bunch of little black letters around me saw this was going to be an interesting font family, just like the family Saroyan writes about, a simple, true one, very unusual and with every member so strange and individual. There were Latin and Cyrillic letters, lower case, upper case letters, wide ones and narrow ones. So the standard set now comprised narrow upper case and regular lower case letters, and the Caps set had wide characters for the per case, and narrow characters for wer case set. This gave me the opportunity to mix and combine them and to have a lot more to play with while working on my book project.
The fifth, eighth and tenth stories were turned into a kind of treasury scrap books as made by this kid, Aram. They had photos, imaginary stamps, pictures of tin candy wraps, Indians, the 1921 Fords…
It was not a long and serious process at all; rather, it was joy, relief, recharging and everything I hoped it would be once I start working on my ode to Mr. Willy.
On March 2006 family Aram is released in American company ITC (International Typeface Corporation) and included in ITC collection as ITC Aram.