Meet the Armenian
Event Details
College Design 5th Floor
78 Cannon Street
London EC4
24 November 2004 7:00pm
Carolyn Puzzovio has been involved in design education for over thirty years. Her background is as a graphic designer and her major interest within the subject has always been lettering and type.
This interest has developed beyond the Latin alphabet – the 38-character Armenian alphabet in particular. During 2007 she designed her first OpenType typeface –Lagoon– based on a Venetian model from 1810. Carolyn’s articles on the subject of the Armenian alphabet and type are published in the latest issues of Baseline, nos. 57 & 58.
Puzzovio co-founded Pomegranate fonts with Edik Ghabuzyan – Carolyn based in the UK and Edik in Yerevan, Armenia. The intention of the partnership is to make a range of readable and beautiful OpenType fonts which incorporate both Latin and Armenian characters available for Macintosh or PC users.
Pomegranate Fonts honours the memory of the Saint Mesrob Mashtots, the Armenian cleric who devised this unique alphabet for the people of Armenia in 405 AD – over 1600 years ago – a vital development for Armenian cultural identity across the diaspora, to this day.
The Armenian alphabet is a phonetic alphabet (ie. each character represents a sound, both vowels and consonants) which was originally devised in the 5th century by a monk, Mesrob Mashtots (St. Mesrob, c.361–440) who is said to have seen the letters in a vision from God.
This alphabet was adopted in 406 AD by an edict of the Armenian King and most letters have remained fundamentally unchanged since then. So, due to this, the Armenian alphabet is fundamental to Armenian religion, language, literature and culture.