One night, frustrated, Noor left her studio and walked to Souq Waqif. The air smelled of oud, cardamom, and grilled haneth. Under a canopy of woven palm fronds, she saw an old man writing a delivery note for a spice merchant. He wasn’t using a computer or even a calligraphy reed. He was using a charred stick from a campfire, dipping it into a bottle of sepia ink.
“Design a font for Qatar,” the Emir’s cultural advisor said. “Not a font from Qatar. A font that is Qatar.”
In a glass-walled studio overlooking the corniche of Doha, a young typeface designer named Noor received an impossible commission.