Almost every bilingual identity in the region is built the same way. The Latin wordmark is designed, approved and signed off. Then, near the end, someone asks for the Arabic version — and a type designer is given three days to match a system that was never built with Arabic proportions in mind.
The result is predictable. The Arabic sits lower or higher than it should. Its weight looks thinner because the Latin was optimised for a different rhythm. Letterspacing gets applied to Arabic, which breaks the connected script entirely. And the brand ends up with a primary language and a tolerated one.
Why the order matters
Arabic is more constrained than Latin. Letters connect, baselines behave differently, and the script has far less tolerance for the distortions Latin absorbs quietly. A system designed to Arabic's constraints will almost always translate cleanly into Latin. The reverse is rarely true.
- Set the Arabic weight and optical size first, then match the Latin to it.
- Never letterspace Arabic — if it needs air, the type size or the typeface is wrong.
- Design the Arabic layout properly, rather than flipping the English one.
- Test both versions at the smallest size you will actually use before approving either.
What changes in practice
On a recent finance website we designed the Arabic version first and built the English from it. The effect was immediate: the right-to-left layout stopped being something to fix at the end. Menus, tables and forms were laid out correctly from the start, so nothing had to be flipped and patched afterwards.
If your Arabic looks like a translation, that is because it was treated like one.
The cost of this approach is roughly one extra week at the start of a project. The cost of not doing it is every subsequent piece of Arabic communication looking slightly wrong for as long as the brand exists.
