You know how a designer will sneak up on you? You see one cool piece, check the name, then another, totally different kind of piece, check the name, and it's made by the same person?

Well it happened to me again. Regular readers know that on my list of "Languages I'd Learn if I Didn't Have to Sleep" are Chinese and Arabic --- Chinese more from the calligraphic side and arabic from the typographic side.

I'm always envious of Arabic speaker/reader/writers who get to use those wonderful shapes to communicate.

Well . . . two points make a line, and this line leads to Dutch-based designer Tarek Atrissi.

I first tuned in to Atrissi with his print and motion identity work, in particular his identity for the state of Qatar, based on gorgeous letterforms, and his broadcast work for BBC and MTV Arabia.

Then, in a completely different context, I found some remarkable, photography-based posters and was surprised and delighted to find out it's the same maker! Plus, from another angle I find out he's the judge of the Adobe Achievement awards this year. I guess I'm the last to find out! But, just in case you haven't savored his work, or haven't savored it lately, do look.

I'd like to enter Atrissi's experiments into our collective thinking about the search for the great new serif.

I find it incredibly illuminating to see someone wrestling with, in a sense, the same geometry and balance issues that Roman alphabet designers wrestle with, but in an utterly different way . . . or, more accurately, with other options than we have. I'd love to see Atrissi discuss the technical details of Arabic font creation before I settled in to experiment with creating a Roman font . . . not to necessarily copy anything specific, but to refresh the mind and the eye in the way that travel always does.