Hasan Abu Afash is educated as an engineer and developed an interest in Arabic type design later in his career. He is an Arabic type designer and typographer, is the founder of HibaStudio, a bilingual website (Arabic and English) featuring Arabic calligraphy, Arabic type design and typography launched in 2007 from Gaza, Palestine. Hiba Studio features his Arabic fonts such as Hasan Elham, Amal, Manal, Aya, Enas, Ghada and Noor.
His type design work ranges from creating custom Arabic fonts, programming Arabic fonts in OpenType, converting fonts from Mac to PC and expanding fonts to cover all languages that use the Arabic script such as Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Kurdish, Pashto … etc.
After his cooperation with Dr. Mamoun Sakkal, which started in 2004, and production of the OpenType font Hasan Al Quds licensed for sale through the Bitstream type library, Hasan was involved in an impressive array of new Arabic type design projects. He has created contemporary Arabic fonts and collaborated with several designers and companies around the world.
In 2008, two of his fonts (Hasan Hiba and Hasan Noor) were upgraded to the DecoType font format for use in WinSoft Tasmeem, which is now bundled with InDesign CS4, by working with Mirjam Somers an award-winning Arabic type designer. Tasmeem is a user interface based on the Arabic Calligraphic Engine (ACE) technology which has won the prestigious Dr. Peter Karow Award. Hasan has also upgraded the Basim Marah font for Tasmeem with Mirjam Somers’ assistance. Basim Marah was drawn by Basim Salem Al Mahdi from Iraq and then digitized by HibaSudio. In the same year, he developed the OpenType project for Alinma TheSans fonts which are based on TheMix Arabic, designed by Luc(as) de Groot and Mouneer ElShaarani for Al Inma Bank, Saudi Arabia. Later on, he developed also the OpenType features for Jumeirah Arabicو which was designed by Pascal Zoghbi (29letters) and Huda AbiFares (Khatt), for Jumeirah International, UAE.
Other projects he participated in include the development of the OpenType layout features needed for the Arabic script system in Seria Arabic fonts family, which was designed by Pascal Zoghbi for FontShop International, as well as the Chams fonts family which was designed by Al Mohtaraf Assaudi for the redesign of the Shams Newspaper in Saudi Arabia and the Arajhi fonts for Alrajhi Bank.
Since 2002, Hasan has worked and collaborated with Mamoun Sakkal in several projects; more notably the Burj Dubai Shilia project, Sakkal Seta, Sakkal Maya, Sakkal Baseet, Sakkal Kufi, and Microsoft Arabic fonts which included the updating of the OpenType instructions for fonts such as; Tahoma, Microsoft Sans Serif, Arial, Times New Roman, Segoe, Courier, Time New Roman, Ms Uighur and Sakkal Majalla.
In 2009, DIN Text Arabic and DIN Text Universal were released in collaboration with Panos Vassiliou of Parachute. This has been certainly one of the most comprehensive typeface design projects in the world today.
