The Kurdish extension of Al Jazeera's news typeface: the additional glyphs drawn in the original's own idiom and fitted for broadcast and screen. Designed by RTL Type at Dawaer.
Al Jazeera font in Kurdish: a Kurdish news typeface created by extending the channel's Arabic-script font to cover the Kurdish alphabet.
Al Jazeera launched a Kurdish-language news service and needed an Al Jazeera font in Kurdish based on its established news face — the typeface used across the screen, ticker and headlines. The Al Jazeera Kurdish font project extended its Arabic-script character set to cover the Kurdish alphabet, working with the channel's Creative Team.
Kurdish is written in Arabic script, but it is not Arabic. It carries letters the Arabic alphabet does not have — ڕ, ڵ, ێ, ۆ, ە — each needing its four contextual forms: initial, medial, final and isolated. Drawing them correctly is not enough; they have to look as though they were born with the rest of the face, at the same pen weight, the same angle, the same dot height.
The harder constraint was the destination: a news screen. Small sizes, motion, a ticker running past, a background that changes behind the text. A letter that reads well in a book can blur on a crawl, so the calibration was for legibility at small size, not beauty at display size.
The result is that a Kurdish viewer sees a bulletin set in the same typeface an Arabic viewer knows — not a substitute face borrowed to fill a gap. That is what it means for an identity to extend into a new language rather than stop at it.
This case study documents Kurdish typeface design, an Arabic-script font for Kurdish, and a Kurdish news font extension, including Kurdish glyph drawing, contextual joins, weights and testing for digital interfaces and television broadcasting.
The work was drawn by Zakaria Saleh through RTLtype.com, a division of Dawaer Digital Development specialising in Arabic typefaces and their extensions.