Gulzar
Designed By
Borna Izadpanah, Fiona Ross, Alice Savoie, Simon Cozens
1 Style Serif
The pleasure
of a well-set
page.
Gulzar · Regular
Compare this serif family in headings and a continuous reading sample.
1 style available. Compare the specimens below, or enter your own text.
Download Gulzar ↓TTF · SIL Open Font License 1.1
Set Your Own Text
Change the style and size to compare the letterforms.
Letters from the flower meadow
A Page In Gulzar
Gulzar · Regular
Headings, labels and running text.
Notes From The Reading Room
The reading room opens onto a quiet courtyard. Along the shelves, small handwritten labels mark the collections. A visitor leaves a book open beside the window, keeping a place for the next reader.
A heading marks the next chapter. The margins leave room for a note while the text continues across the page.
1 Style,
One Family
Every available style is shown below in its own font file.
Regular400
Letters from the flower meadow
Gulzar means “flower meadow” in Urdu, and it was a long wish of Borna Izadpanah’s before it was a font. He grew up in Tehran and learned Nasta’liq at primary school as the model for Persian handwriting; making a digital version of it, he said, had been a dream of his for years. Gulzar is that version, aimed at Urdu readers, for text sizes and long reading on screens and on paper.
The work started with history. The team went back through Urdu digital type from the early 1980s on, and Izadpanah studied calligraphy manuals and a collection of lettering specimens for the proportions, the swell of the strokes and the small habits that give Nasta’liq its specifically Urdu flavor. Fiona Ross came as a consultant who had worked on Nasta’liq type before, Sheeraz and Qalmi for Linotype. Simon Cozens did the font engineering. Amir Mahdi Moslehi advised on calligraphy, Martin Dodds consulted on the Urdu, and the group took advice from Urdu specialists in Pakistan and in the United Kingdom.
Then came the Latin, and this is where Gulzar did something no Nasta’liq type had done before it: an original Latin drawn to go with it. Alice Savoie based it on 2 old masters, the sturdy proportions of Robert Granjon’s types and the sharper feel of Hendrik van den Keere, and let some of the Nasta’liq contrast show through. The character set covers the letters with dots and bars underneath used to transliterate Arabic, Persian and Urdu, so a scholar can put a word in Urdu and its romanized form side by side in matching type.
1 Regular weight in this download, with swashes, old style and tabular figures and 4 stylistic sets. Google tags it as a display face. We would still hand it a full page of Urdu before a headline, since that is where all the research went.
Characters & Figures
414 glyphs reported in the reference style. This selection shows 400 recorded characters.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
0123456789 & @ ? !
View The Recorded Character Selection
The Font Files
Download
Gulzar
1 TTF style with the accompanying CSS, README and license information.
Download ZIP · 391 KB ↓- Version
- 1.000
- License
- SIL Open Font License 1.1
Install On Your Computer
Extract the ZIP first. On Windows, select the font files and choose Install from the context menu. On macOS, open the files in Font Book and choose Install.
Use On A Website
Keep the font files and the included stylesheet together. Update the stylesheet path to match your project.
<link rel="stylesheet"
href="/fonts/gulzar/gulzar.css">
body {
font-family: 'Gulzar', sans-serif;
}Keep the copyright and license notices with redistributed files.
Heading & Body
The family provides the heading; Inter carries the supporting text.
Gulzar Heading · Inter Body
Notes From The Reading Room
The reading room opens onto a quiet courtyard. Along the shelves, small handwritten labels mark the collections. A visitor leaves a book open beside the window, keeping a place for the next reader.