How to choose fonts for a brand in Arabic and English

To choose fonts for a brand, start from the brand's personality, not from a list of favourite fonts. Pick one face for headings and one for text, make sure the Arabic and English versions sound like the same voice, test them small on a real phone, and check that the licence covers every place the brand will appear. That is the whole method. The rest of this article is about doing each step well.

Many guides offer a table of "the right font" for each industry: a serif for law firms, a script for weddings. That shortcut causes a lot of bad choices. Fonts do not belong to industries. They carry tone, and the tone comes from the brief.

Below I cover type personality, Arabic and Latin pairing, legibility, licences, web performance and when to draw your own letters, then a step-by-step method and a real example from this site.

What a typeface says before anyone reads it

Every typeface has a voice. Before a word is read, the shapes have already said formal or friendly, old or new, loud or quiet. Your job is to choose that voice on purpose.

The main Latin styles

The main Arabic styles

Arabic type grows from calligraphic traditions:

• Naskh: the everyday book hand. Most comfortable Arabic text faces are built on it.
• Kufi: angular and geometric. Many modern, technical-looking Arabic faces come from it.
• Thuluth: grand and ornamental. For display, never for paragraphs.
• Diwani: flowing and decorative. Beautiful in a title, hard work in a sentence.
• Ruq'ah: quick, simple handwriting. Friendly and informal.

In brand work I mostly use modern, simplified faces built on Naskh or Kufi structures for text, and keep calligraphic styles for the logo or a headline.

Turn the brief into three words

Before you open a font menu, write three words for how the brand should feel, such as "warm, local, honest". Judge every candidate against those words, not against your own taste.

Pairing an Arabic face with a Latin one

For brands in the Arab world, this is the hard part. Most fonts are designed for one script. Put an Arabic face next to an unrelated Latin one and they can look like two companies sharing a business card.

Visual size

Latin type has an x-height: the height of lowercase letters such as x and o. Arabic has no lowercase, but the main bodies of its letters play the same role. At the same point size, many Arabic faces look noticeably smaller than their Latin partners. So set a line of each, then scale the Arabic until the bodies match the Latin lowercase by eye.

Weight

"Bold" in one family is not "Bold" in another. Compare stroke thickness, not weight names. Check the range too: some Arabic families come in only a few weights, so make sure each role in your system has a matching pair.

Rhythm and structure

A geometric, Kufi-style Arabic sits well with a geometric sans. A Naskh-based face, with its contrast between thick and thin, sits better with a humanist sans or a serif. Set a paragraph of each, step back and half-close your eyes. The two textures should feel related.

Numbers and punctuation

Decide which digits the brand uses in Arabic text. On this site, Arabic text uses Western digits (0 to 9) throughout. Then check that the Arabic face has those digits drawn to match, along with the Arabic comma and question mark.

Families made for both scripts

The easiest route is a family designed with Arabic and Latin together. Google Fonts has several, such as IBM Plex Sans Arabic with IBM Plex Sans, Noto Sans Arabic with Noto Sans, and Readex Pro, an Arabic and Latin expansion of Lexend by Thomas Jockin and Nadine Chahine. Two separate families can work just as well if they pass the tests above.

Legibility at small sizes and on screens

Most people will meet the brand's type on a phone, often small, sometimes in bright sun. Test for that, not for the presentation screen.

• Open shapes: the spaces inside letters should stay open at small sizes.
• Clear dots: in Arabic, dots are the only difference between letters such as ب ت ث ن ي. If they shrink or merge, reading slows down.
• Moderate contrast: hairline strokes disappear on screens and in cheap print.
• More line height for Arabic: it needs room for tall letters, deep descenders and diacritics.
• No letter-spacing on Arabic: the letters are meant to join, and tracking breaks the rhythm.
• No fake styles: do not let software fake a bold or italic. Slanted Arabic rarely reads well unless the designer drew it that way.

Test on a real phone, in both languages, with real content such as prices and phone numbers.

Licences: free, paid and subscription

A font is software, and its licence decides where you may use it. This is the step most often skipped.

Google's own FAQ says its fonts can be used commercially, including in logos. The SIL Open Font License lets you use, embed and modify a font, but not sell the font itself.

Two habits save problems: buy paid licences in the client's name, and keep the core brand fonts independent of anyone's personal subscription.

Web performance

Fonts add weight to every page, and Arabic fonts tend to be heavier because each letter has several joined forms.

• Use as few weights as you can. Each weight is a separate file, unless you use a variable font.
• Serve WOFF2, the compressed format modern browsers support.
• Subset the files so the page loads only the characters it needs.
• Use font-display: swap, so text shows straight away in a fallback font.
• Preload only the one or two files used at the top of the page.
• Consider self-hosting. Modern browsers keep a separate cache for each site, so a visitor does not already have a popular font just because another site used it.

When to draw custom lettering instead

Fonts are for text. A logo is usually better drawn. I draw custom lettering when:

• The name is the logo, and typing it in a font would make it easy to copy.
• The Arabic name has letter combinations that fonts set awkwardly.
• The Arabic and English names need to share strokes or a baseline.
• The brand needs a feeling no available font has.

At Kababgy Al-Sultan, a grill house in Egypt, the mark is hand-drawn lettering, and the name and supporting text use a heavy, rounded Arabic face. At Abdeen Coffee the wordmark is drawn by hand like a seal, with a clear geometric Arabic face for text. For SLS, a Saudi real estate company, I drew the Arabic and Latin letters on one baseline so they share their strokes. Typing a name in a font and calling it a logo is one of the common logo design mistakes.

A full custom typeface is a much bigger project that suits large brands with a lot of text. For most brands, a hand-drawn wordmark plus well-chosen licensed fonts is the right balance.

A step-by-step method

1. Write three personality words from the brief.
2. List the real content: headlines, paragraphs, prices, small print, in both languages.
3. Shortlist three to five Arabic faces with the weights you need.
4. Find a Latin partner for each, or a family that covers both scripts.
5. Set real text side by side and scale the Arabic until the letter bodies match.
6. Test on a phone, in print, small, and reversed on a dark background.
7. Check the licence for every use: print, web, app, video and the logo.
8. Check the file sizes for the website.
9. Write the system down: sizes, weights, line heights and spacing for each script.

A real example: this site

This site pairs Lexend for English with Zain for Arabic. Both are on Google Fonts under the SIL Open Font License.

• Lexend is a variable sans serif family by Bonnie Shaver-Troup and Thomas Jockin, designed with reading ease in mind.
• Zain is a modern Arabic and Latin family from Boutros Fonts, made for headlines, sub-headings and body text.

They are not one family. Lexend has its own Arabic companion in Readex Pro, so a matched pair was available. Zain is a separate design, so the pair has to pass the same tests as any other: Arabic bodies at the same visual height as Lexend's lowercase, weights that feel equal, and paragraphs with a related texture. When two families are close but not exact, give each script its own size and line height rather than forcing one setting on both. And because both are open source, the licence covers the website, print and social posts, and the files can be hosted on the site itself.

Conclusion

Good brand type is a decision, not a discovery. Start from the brand's voice, choose faces that speak it in both scripts, test them where real people will read them, and check the licence before you fall in love. Draw the logo, and let fonts carry everything around it.

If you want help building a type system for your brand in Arabic and English, start a project here.