Nuṛ
նուռ · pomegranate
Coloring the Armenian alphabet
Thirty-nine letters, each one a page, each page a picture. In Nuṛ, the letter itself is the art.
The alphabet
Thirty-nine letters, sixteen centuries
Mesrop Mashtots created the Armenian alphabet around the year 405 with 36 letters. Over the centuries it grew to the 39 letters Armenian uses today, from Ա to Ֆ. It is one of the oldest alphabets still in daily use, and for many families in the diaspora it is the piece of Armenia that lives closest to home: on a grandmother's bookshelf, in a Saturday-school notebook, on the spine of a storybook.
Ա Բ Գ Դ Ե
The idea
The letter is the page
Most alphabet coloring books print a letter beside a picture: A, and then an apple. Nuṛ does what Armenian scribes have done for about a thousand years and makes the letter itself the picture. Each of the 39 pages is one large letterform carrying its design inside the stroke, in the manner of zardagir, the Armenian decorated-letter tradition: a bird here, a vine there, a row of ornament cells to fill one by one.
Two rules shape every page. The regions are big enough for small fingers, a handful of generous shapes rather than a manuscript's dense interlace. And the letter stays legible: however much decoration a glyph carries, a child coloring Ա is still looking at Ա, not at a puzzle that used to be one.
How it colors
Tap a shape, watch it fill
Like every page in Nuṛ, the letters color by tap. Pick a crayon, tap a shape, and the color spreads outward from your fingertip. Solid, Soft, Deep and Glitter fills each behave differently; the Woven fill, which lays color in like carpet thread, comes with Plus. A finished letter replays from blank to done and can be saved to Photos or printed as clean line art to color again at the kitchen table.
Free and Plus
What is free, what opens with Plus
Your first Armenian letters are free, together with sample pages from the rest of the book, and they are free for good rather than for a trial period. The whole alphabet, all 39 letters, opens with Nuṛ Plus: $5.99 a month or $35.99 a year, about half price annually, with Apple Family Sharing included and no free trial.
Nuṛ is coming soon to the App Store for iPhone and iPad. For a note when it ships, write to [email protected]. More about the app on the Nuṛ page.