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Typeface specimen spread for “Sutera”, showing blackletter-inspired letters in black and orange over a circular pattern

Sutera The Transformation of Jawi to Latin

Category
Typography
Role
Type Designer
Timeline
Aug–Nov 2025
Skills
  • Illustrator
  • InDesign
  • Creative thinking
  • Design thinking
  • Creative exploration

The brief

For this project, we were tasked to create a font that relates back to the Southeast Asian culture.

Overview

A typography project transforming Southeast Asian culture into Latin words. I used Jawi because of my own personal history with it, being a Muslim in Singapore. The idea was to use the diamonds and curvatures to make the script and to have the possibility of making it handwritten.

The challenge

How to make the type design readable for the general public?

Creating a script font from another language is not easy. When creating this font I decided to place myself in a user's shoes, what if I want to write it down manually? That was when the idea of breaking up the script into different parts and piecing them back together came about.

Three Jawi words broken into colour-coded strokes (red, blue, green) and rebuilt step by step into the Latin letters A, M and W
Letterform features breakdownThe letterforms are broken into 2‑3 parts, focusing on the main features of Jawi letterforms. They are then reconstructed to form the specific letters. Some adjustments were made, such as tightening the kerning or leading, so it looks better when the letters are placed together, forming a word.
Sutera characters E, Z, 8, 9, 0, e, j, ! and punctuation, with the diamond details ringed in orange dotted circles
Font featuresThe ideology of this font was for it to have the ability to be handwritten. Uppercase letters contain swooping calligraphy following the gestures of the Jawi font. For the lowercase letters, the ideology was to think of them like little siblings of the uppercase letters, so little nuances such as the diamonds seen in Jawi fonts are added in. The font is named Sutera because of its own structure, where curves and strokes are used, showing how smoothly it glides on paper if written. This follows the meaning of Sutera, which is silk in Indonesian/Malay.
Type specimen spread: a Malay poem with its English translation over a grid of Sutera letters, beside the cover with SUTERA in large orange letters
Final typeface: the full Sutera alphabet, upper and lower case, with punctuation, set in orange and in black
Type specimen spread: four ringed letter details, each with a note on the Jawi script letter that inspired it
  • #1a1a1a
  • #e0663a
  • #d9d9d9

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