Maham Momin

Play It By Ear, Part 3: Words

Designing through improvisation, repetition, and collaboration. Through my study of words, I created a series of letterforms through various different processes by extracting elements of Qawwali that inform its’ success in healing our relationships to each other and to the Earth. I wanted to emphasize the process of creating typographic forms more than the final result to re-imagine and contextualize our relationship with the things around us, through typography.The first collection of forms uses collaboration, deformation, and storytelling to create a sort of palimpsest typeface wherein it combines the handwriting of multiple people. The second collection captures the action of creating sounds into letterforms—clapping to shape typographic forms. The third collection documents an improvised and impulsive design process wherein I convey elements of Qawwali visually by applying them to each letterform through a series of steps. This ongoing project hopes to free language and typographic practice from pre-conceived colonial understandings of form and communication.