Custom Arabic typeface design by RTLtype, including Riyad Bank's exclusive typeface, Arla Type and Al Jazeera's Kurdish news typeface.
A logo is drawn once, and then the company writes itself in a typeface somebody else licensed. A commissioned face is the layer that makes an advertisement, a package or a screen recognisable before the logo appears on it.
We run the type foundry RTLtype, with more than twenty published Arabic families and commissioned faces for clients including Riyad Bank, Arla, Nespresso, Libya Al Ahrar and Al Jazeera — whose news typeface we extended to cover the Kurdish alphabet.
We draw exclusive faces from scratch, extend an existing one into a new language or weight, and Arabise a Latin face so the two stand as equals rather than one reading as a translation of the other.
Frequently asked questions
What does a custom Arabic typeface cost?
Cost is counted in glyphs and weights, not in days. A single weight for a limited use — a wordmark, a campaign headline — is far less than a full family used across every printed and on-screen surface a company has. Licence scope adds to it: a face for one organisation differs from one distributed to its agencies and suppliers. We quote after a single session that fixes the use and the weights.
How long does an Arabic typeface take?
Extending an existing face into a new language or weight takes four to eight weeks. An exclusive face drawn from scratch takes three to six months for a family of several weights. The Arabic alphabet is the reason: each letter has four forms depending on its position, so what looks like twenty-eight letters is in practice more than two hundred shapes before figures and punctuation.
Can a Latin face our brand already uses be Arabised?
Yes, and it is the most frequent request from international brands entering the Gulf market. The Latin letterform is not copied onto Arabic — that produces distorted letters that read badly. The Latin face is read instead for what characterises it: pen weight, the contrast between thin and thick, the temper of its terminals. The Arabic is then drawn with those qualities and with the rules of Arabic writing, so both stand as equals on the same page.
Does a commissioned face include figures and punctuation?
Yes, and both sets of figures are drawn: Arabic-Indic (٠١٢٣) and Western Arabic (0123), because the Saudi market uses both — the first in official print, the second in prices and digital interfaces. Punctuation, symbols and, where asked for, vocalisation marks are part of the delivery.
Why is Arabic type design harder than Latin?
A Latin letter is drawn once: A is A at the start of a word and at the end. An Arabic letter joins what comes before and after it, so it is drawn in four forms — initial, medial, final and isolated. Twenty-eight letters become more than a hundred shapes before figures and punctuation. Add to that a baseline that moves rather than holds, marks that sit above and below the letter, and combinations that must be drawn whole rather than assembled from parts. This is why arabising a Latin face is not translation but a second design.
Which languages use Arabic script and need the face extended?
Persian, Urdu, Kurdish, Pashto, Uyghur and others are written in Arabic script, and each carries letters Arabic does not have. Kurdish needs ڕ ڵ ێ ۆ ە; Persian needs پ چ ژ گ; Urdu needs ٹ ڈ ڑ. Because every letter is drawn in four forms, extending a face to one language can mean dozens of new shapes — and they have to be drawn in the voice of that face rather than borrowed from another. We extended Al Jazeera's news typeface to the Kurdish alphabet on exactly that basis.
Who designed the Al Jazeera font in Kurdish?
Zakaria Saleh, through Dawaer's RTLtype foundry, designed the Kurdish extension of Al Jazeera's news typeface with the channel's Creative Team. The work added the missing Kurdish letters and their contextual forms, then tested the font on news screens and moving tickers for legibility at small sizes.
How is a typeface tested before handover?
It is tested where it will live, not on a specimen sheet. A face bound for a news screen is calibrated for legibility at small sizes over moving backgrounds rather than elegance at headline size — a letter that reads well in a book can blur on a ticker. A face bound for print is tested in print. And we set the client's own text: their city names, the terms of their field, because the combinations that expose a flaw appear in their words rather than in a specimen sentence.