Arabic Typography and Fonts - Recommendations for Multilingual Design Projects

Typography & Fonts
1

Working on a multilingual project that needs to work in English and Arabic and I’m not a native Arabic speaker, which makes typeface selection feel high-stakes. Compiling what I’ve learned and asking for input from anyone with more experience in this area.

Technical realities of Arabic typography for designers coming from Latin:

Right-to-left flow changes layout logic entirely. In Figma or Illustrator, text frames need explicit RTL setting or the cursor behavior and justification will be wrong. This is not optional configuration.

Arabic script is connected - letters join and their form changes based on position in the word (initial, medial, final, isolated). A typeface family needs to include all positional variants. This is not something you can approximate.

Font pairing for bilingual work: the typeface personalities need to match in weight, tone, and formality even though the scripts are visually very different. Finding pairs where both feel like they belong to the same design language is the actual challenge.

Typefaces I’ve found that work:

For professional/corporate: Noto Nastaliq Urdu (free, Google), IBM Plex Arabic (free, open source). Both have Latin companion faces that pair naturally.

For contemporary brand identity: Almarai (Google, free) reads modern and clean. Works well for tech and lifestyle brands.

For display/expressive: This is where I still feel uncertain. The decorative Arabic typefaces on Creative Market vary extremely in quality and cultural accuracy.

If you work in Arabic-language markets regularly: what’s in your type toolkit?

2

The typeface personality matching point is the hardest part. It’s easy to find Arabic fonts that are technically good. It’s much harder to find Arabic and Latin fonts at the same level of contemporary craft that feel like they’re from the same design world.

3

For anyone doing layout: paragraph direction settings are easy to miss in multi-text-block layouts. A single text frame with wrong direction setting creates alignment and punctuation problems that look subtle but will be immediately obvious to Arabic readers.

4

@zara.phantom the concern about decorative Arabic typeface quality is valid. Many Arabic display fonts created outside the Arabic-speaking world have positional form errors that native readers notice immediately. Having local review of type choices before finalizing is worth the step.

5

Almarai is in my kit and it’s reliable for the brand contexts you described. For healthcare and professional services work I’ve also had good results with Tajawal (Google Fonts) - clean, very legible at small sizes, and the Latin companion is acceptable.

6

worked on a packaging project with Arabic and French (not English) and the RTL/LTR flip in a horizontal layout was the main challenge. ended up with centered layout for the main brand elements and separate text blocks for each language rather than trying to mirror the flow.