Amharareduced Font

Amhara Reduced by Ingo Zimmermann is a free decorative display font with an exceptionally tall, compressed silhouette. Its narrow letters mix broad vertical strokes with fine crossbars and tightly drawn curves, and some forms taper toward the baseline. The exaggerated height is the main event.

A fashion poster is its clearest setting, with the compressed forms also suiting music packaging, club flyers, and experimental magazine covers. The font is most convincing when typography itself becomes the poster image, turning a name or event title into a dense vertical pattern with sharp shifts between broad strokes and delicate joins.

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An experiment: a Latin alphabet modeled on the Ethiopian Ge'ez script.

Amhara was created by adapting typical Amharic forms to the Western European alphabet. Nearly all the formal characteristics of Ge'ez could be transferred to the lowercase letters.

Ethiopian script is characterized by emphasized expanded vertical strokes resulting from the horizontal position of the pen. The most frequent form is the open bow at the bottom. The symmetrical bowl at the transition from expanded to light and back to expanded strokes is another defining feature. Semitic scripts also contain many forms of commas, serifs, rings, and other additional elements. These diacritic marks add vowel sounds to the 28 basic consonant characters, resulting in 276 different syllable characters. This range of forms makes it possible to assemble components for European characters.

Some forms hardly ever appear in Ge'ez: the individual straight stroke, as in I, and the diagonal stroke from the upper right to the lower left, which appears only in Z. All Amharic characters contain at least an indication of a stroke from the upper left and a small downstroke at the bottom toward the right. Amhara retains this direction of movement to a great extent.

At ingoFonts, all fonts can be downloaded free of charge.

The downloadable files contain only a reduced font consisting of uppercase and lowercase letters from A to Z and a to z.

The complete font, including numerals, umlauts, punctuation, and especially ligatures, is available only upon purchase.