The 2025 HMCT Typographer-in-Residence program featured Lebanese designer, educator, and researcher Yara Khoury Nammour, with Colette Syed as Typography Fellow. Nammour, an assistant professor of graphic design at the American University of Beirut (AUB), leads the Arabic Type Research Unit and co-organizes the biennial Mashq conference, both dedicated to advancing the study and practice of Arabic typography.

During her residency, Nammour investigated the visual imprint of Arabic type through a quantitative and aesthetic analysis of letter frequency. Drawing on her expertise in Arabic type design, she developed a custom software tool that performed a comprehensive count of all allographs and their variations across an extensive corpus of Arabic texts.

This project offered new insights into the structure and rhythm of Arabic script, revealing how frequency patterns influence typographic form, texture, and visual balance. By merging computational analysis with typographic research, Nammour’s work expanded the understanding of Arabic letterforms as both linguistic and visual systems