It is time for a new era in Arabic Type Design. An era in which the script is the source of typographic information. What we ask for may sound obvious and it is. Understanding the script then moving to type is nowhere near innovative. In Arabic however - contrary to popular belief - this bridge has not yet been made.

ATDB or Arabic Type Design - Beirut is the first intensive program entirely dedicated to Arabic type design. Its first rendition took place between July 11th and August 19th 2016. Below is an account of why the program came about and how it happened.

Nearly 10 years after its creation Fedra Arabic is being rereleased, completely redrawn and remastered, featuring new styles and weights.

Our daily lives are full of noise, but when we immerse ourselves in reading, it seems to disappear. But what if the shapes of the words we read also contain perceptible noise? Does it disrupt the reading process, or do we learn to filter it out?

Documentation and research that lead to design of Arabic newspaper typeface

The rounded sibling of Kanun and Arabic counterpart of Typotheque's October.

Kanun is an Arabic signage type family carefully crafted to also handle long texts.

Fedra Arabic Display is a collection of extreme light and dark fonts for large sizes. All styles have been optimised for compact settings.

Kristyan Sarkis is a type designer and lettering artist, born in Beirut and based in Amsterdam. He holds a Master in Type & Media from the Roy...

Bahman Eslami is a designer specialized in Arabic type design, animation and creative coding. Reputedly a TypeMedia graduate who works and lives in Th...

Back in 2007, a book Typographic matchmaking was published along with a CD with free beta versions of fonts produced for the projects. THe CD included early version of Fedra Arabic, however the fonts were not yet vocalised with dynamic mark positioning in fonts.

Adobe CS4 and CS5 officially doesn't support Arabic. Instead, there is a separate ME version (Middle Eastern) which supports left-to-right languages.

Some old text documents working with Arabic or Indic languages use 8-bit encoding, which required to use proprietary fonts. Such fonts can only use 256 glyphs, which is not sufficient for correct rendering of Devanagari (or other 10 Indic writing scripts).

TPTQ Arabic designs and develops Unicode-compliant fonts. Below are some instructions for using Unicode fonts to set Devanagari texts.

QuarkXPress® requires AXt fonts and Layout Ltd’s ArabicXT™ extension for setting Arabic text. AXt fonts are non-Unicode fonts, using the ‘Mac Roman’ encoding; Arabic glyphs are substituted for the Roman glyphs, so for example ‘alef’ replaces capital letter G.

TPTQ Arabic offers Multilingual Unicode Compliant Fonts in WGL4, and larger character sset supporting over 80 languages in standard Latin, Central European, Baltic, Turkish, Greek, Cyrillic, and Arabic encodings.