Martin Majoor’s first sketches of FF Seria started in 1996 while on the train from Berlin to Warsaw. As a book designer FF Scala often gave him difficulty because the short ascenders and descenders produced a very “stubby” look inappropriate for literary books and poetry. To counteract this, FF Seria was drawn with especially long ascenders and descenders and very fine detailing. Seeing how well other designers combined FF Scala and FF Scala Sans, Majoor decided from the outset to make a sans version within the Seria family. Like the serif version, FF Seria Sans has extremely long ascenders and descenders – quite distinctive for a sans serif face. Critical reception to FF Seria was positive, too. In addition to receiving an ISTD Award in 2001, the typeface was included in the ATypI’s list of the best designs of the previous decade at its 2001 bukva:raz! contest and exhibition. In 2009, an Arabic version was added to the Serif version, developed by Lebanese designer Pascal Zoghbi. It was originally published as part of the first Typographic Matchmaking project, organized by the Khatt Foundation. The quality of this Majoor–Zoghbi collaboration was so high that FontFont chose the design to be its first Arabic typeface release. FF Seria Arabic is a young, crisp type based on the Nasekh style. The typeface also functions independently as a modern Arabic design. FF Seria Arabic includes basic Latin (Western) and Arabic character sets. Since FF Seria does not have any Light and Black variants, the FF Seria Arabic Light includes FF Seria Regular Western characters instead, while FF Seria Arabic Black contains the Western characters of FF Seria Bold. Type designer and font engineer Hasan Abu Afash created the OpenType layout features necessary to properly lay out the Arabic script on a typographical level.
