Journal · Typography
Why your Arabic logo looks wrong
Four mistakes that make a bilingual identity read as two brands sharing a signboard. Every Arabic speaker notices. Most briefs never mention it.
Walk down any commercial street where two scripts share a signboard. Roughly half of it carries a Latin wordmark that has clearly been designed with care, sitting beside an Arabic version that hasn't. The Arabic is usually set in whatever system font was available, at whatever size made it fit, in a weight nobody chose.
This isn't a small aesthetic complaint. In a market where most of your customers read Arabic first, the script they trust least is the one you've spent the least on. It quietly signals that the Arabic reading customer is the secondary audience, which for most businesses here is backwards.
Here are the four failures, in order of how often we see them.
1. The Arabic was made after the English
This is the root cause of the other three. A studio designs the Latin wordmark, presents it, gets sign-off, and only then asks someone to "do the Arabic." By that point every meaningful decision about proportion, contrast, weight and personality has already been made in a script with completely different mechanics.
Latin letterforms are built from vertical stems and enclosed counters. Arabic is built from a horizontal baseline, connected strokes, and a rhythm of ascenders and descenders that behaves nothing like an x-height. You cannot derive one from the other. You can only design them in parallel and reconcile them.
If the Arabic took an afternoon and the English took three weeks, it will look like it.
2. The weights don't match optically
A designer picks Bold in the Latin and Bold in the Arabic and assumes they'll sit together. They almost never do. Arabic typefaces carry weight differently. The connecting stroke, the baseline thickness and the counters distribute mass in a way that usually reads lighter beside an equivalently named Latin weight.
The fix is to stop trusting the name of the weight and start trusting your eye. Print both at the size they'll actually appear, put them side by side, and squint. If one recedes, adjust until they don't. This frequently means pairing a Latin Bold with an Arabic Black, or the reverse.
3. The vertical alignment is wrong
Arabic has no capital height and no true x-height. Centring an Arabic wordmark on the same optical axis as a Latin one produces a lockup that looks like it's sliding downhill, the Arabic appears to float, or to sink.
Arabic aligns to its baseline, and the visual centre of mass usually sits lower than you expect. In a horizontal lockup, the two scripts should share a baseline and be balanced by mass rather than by bounding box. In a stacked lockup, the optical gap between them almost always needs to be tighter than the mathematical one.
4. Nobody defined which script leads
This is a strategy failure rather than a craft one, and it's the most consequential. On a shopfront, a menu, a delivery bag and an Instagram post, which script comes first? Which is larger? Are they ever used alone?
Most guidelines never say. So the decision gets made ad hoc by whoever is producing each asset, and within a year the brand has no consistent bilingual behaviour at all.
Decide it once and write it down:
- Which script is primary in the domestic market, and which for export
- The exact ratio between them in a lockup
- Whether either may appear alone, and where
- What happens in a square social avatar, where usually only one can fit
How to check yours in five minutes
Print your logo at the size it appears on your signage and on a business card. Then:
- Squint at it. Does one script visually dominate? If yes, that's a weight mismatch.
- Cover the Latin. Does the Arabic still look like a designed mark, or like typed text?
- Cover the Arabic. Same question.
- Show it to someone who reads Arabic first and ask which half looks more expensive. The answer is the problem.
What it costs to fix
Adapting an existing English identity into a properly-drawn Arabic counterpart is a two-to-three week job. We charge from $900 for it, and it is comfortably the highest-return small project available to most businesses here, because it repairs the thing your largest audience is looking at every day.
If you're starting from nothing, insist that both scripts are designed together from the first sketch. Any studio that treats this as an add-on line item is telling you how they'll handle it.