FF Falafel supports up to 50 different languages such as Spanish, English, Portuguese, German, French, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Irish, Basque, Luxembourgian, and Icelandic in Latin and other scripts.
Please note that not all languages are available for all formats.
The “FF Levant” package is a collection of two typefaces: FF Bagel and FF Falafel.
The designer, Per Jørgensen, said: “FF Falafel was the first FF Levant typeface to be designed. The idea came from watching Arabic lettering and seeing shapes that resembled Latin letters: Would it be possible to create an entire Latin alphabet by extracting shapes from Arabic? The design was done between 1994 and 2001 and turned out to be complicated by the intricate and often overlapping letterforms that in fact necessitated some 40 ligatures in a separate font.
FF Bagel was done during 2000 and 2001 with the same principle of first giving an impression of a foreign writing, and only then revealing itself as legible to Western readers. It was much less complicated than FF Falafel, though, as Hebrew letters do not touch in the same way as Arabic ones. For both fonts it was a challenge to stay as simple as most Semitic forms of writing are, and to mimic their right-to-left dynamics.”
