Abeera Kamran is a graphic designer and a front-end web developer based in Birmingham, UK and Karachi, Pakistan. Through her work she is interested in studying the relationship between urban infrastructures and local visual cultures. She is currently studying for an MA Research in Typography at the University of Reading. Her research project investigates the cultural, design and technological challenges around the typographic representation of Lahori nasta'liq in web browsers. She designs and co-produces Exhausted Geographies which is a series of publications critically rethinking the popular representations of Karachi in mainstream media. She is the web designer for the Karachi Urban Lab where she designs multi-lingual data visualisations and web content. She has curated for the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and written for 'A Selective Guide to the V&A's South Asia Collection', published by Delfina Foundation.

Nastaʿlīq typography on the web, one glitch at a time.
Urdu reading culture is dominated by a single script style, nastaʿlīq, and often by a single typeface, Jameel Noori Nastaleeq. A language that has a 170 million speakers globally but is defined by a single script style results in a particular set of opportunities and challenges for typeface designers. I will be discussing Urdu’s ideologically charged relationship with nastaʿlīq and how that impacts the future of the language in an increasingly digital age. I will focus on the design and technological challenges that Urdu typography faces in the fluid environment of the web browser, and how the sophistication of Urdu print culture may inform best practices on the web.