Most Qatar brands treat Arabic as a translation of English — an afterthought applied after the English design is approved. The result is bilingual branding that looks like two separate brands awkwardly coexisting: the English version polished, the Arabic version squeezed into whatever space remained.
This isn't just an aesthetic problem. In a market where a significant portion of your audience reads Arabic first, a poorly executed Arabic identity signals that you don't take that audience seriously.
Arabic Typography Fundamentals
Script Direction
Arabic reads right-to-left. This isn't just a text direction — it affects layout logic, information hierarchy, and how the eye moves through a design. A bilingual layout that treats Arabic as mirrored English will feel awkward to native readers because the visual flow contradicts how they read.
Font Selection
The Arabic typeface ecosystem is smaller than Latin but has grown substantially in recent years. Key considerations: does the Arabic font have appropriate weight variants? Is it designed to pair with the Latin typeface you've chosen? Does it perform at both display sizes (logos, headlines) and text sizes (body copy, captions)? Many Latin typefaces have Arabic companion fonts — Neue Helvetica, for instance, has an Arabic version — but the pairing should be specified by a designer, not assumed.
Optical Weight Matching
Arabic letterforms are visually heavier than Latin at equivalent font sizes. A headline that reads as bold in English may appear overwhelming in Arabic at the same point size, or the reverse — the Arabic may look lighter and lose visual prominence. Good bilingual typesetting involves optical adjustment, not just matching point sizes.
Line Height and Spacing
Arabic uses diacritical marks above and below the baseline that require different line-height values than Latin text. Body copy set at standard Latin line-height often clips Arabic diacriticals. This is a common error in bilingual documents that use the same text styles for both scripts.
Bilingual Logo Design
A logo that works in Arabic and English is harder to design than one that works in only one script. The challenge is creating visual consistency — similar weight, personality, and presence — in two typographically very different systems. Good bilingual logos are designed together, not translated one from the other. The Arabic version should feel like it belongs to the same brand, not like a literal transliteration in an arbitrary font.
Common Mistakes in Qatar Brand Design
- Using a single generic Arabic font (often Simplified Arabic or Arial Unicode MS) for everything — these are system fonts, not brand fonts
- Setting Arabic body copy at the same size as English and wondering why it's hard to read
- Not testing Arabic text in context — approving the English layout and assuming the Arabic will work the same way
- Using romanised transliteration in the Arabic version (writing the English word in Arabic letters) when a proper Arabic equivalent exists
- Ignoring right-to-left layout logic in digital contexts — Arabic websites and apps need genuine RTL implementation, not just flipped text
Arabic in Digital Design
Arabic support in digital design has improved significantly. Modern CSS handles RTL layout reliably with the dir="rtl" attribute and text-align: start. Web font services like Google Fonts and Adobe Fonts include Arabic typefaces. The gap is usually not technical — it's that designers don't think through the RTL layout as carefully as the LTR version, leaving Arabic digital experiences feeling like second-class implementations.
Working With an Arabic Typographer
Not all designers have strong Arabic typography skills. When briefing a designer on bilingual work, ask specifically about their Arabic typography experience. Can they show examples of bilingual brand identities they've designed? Do they work with a native Arabic reader to review final layouts? A designer who hasn't done serious bilingual work before will produce results that look fine to non-Arabic readers but feel wrong to the audience you're trying to reach.