In the sixties my calligraphy was inspired by ancient texts such as I saw in photographs of the Dead Sea scrolls. During the seventies living in Israel I could only dream of creating a font. After retiring I discovered that software tools had become available making this dream a reality and I spent about eight years creating Mike Hebrew. This font which was available as a Free Hebrew Font on my art website. It proved popular with 58,000 visits and a total of 25,251 individual fonts downloaded. This success encouraged me to use my TrueType font as the basis for a new font using the latest technology of OpenType and so this font Shuneet was created.
I design the font by using it. In my early calligraphy I would sometimes use a known design such as Yerushalmi but mostly I let my own preferences guide me. Also I copied letter forms from the Dead Sea Scrolls. When it came to designing the font for the computer I started out with my preferred calligraphic shapes. I worked by looking at pages of text on computer seeing the page as a whole. As I am not a native speaker (or reader) of Hebrew so I chose texts with which I could become familiar - poems, biblical passages and songs. As I became more familiar with the songs, my Hebrew reading improved. Instead of single letters, I saw whole words, phrases and even sentences at a single glance. This has greatly influenced the design of the font. Each letter blends in to become a part of the whole. While looking at the song lyrics, I listen to the music and delight at the many renderings of a single song. This accounts for an unusual feature of this website. I display the lyrics in my own fonts and provide Internet links to the music so you too can read and listen.
Michael Cunliffe Thompson