Solitaire, an upscale women’s boutique, needed one logo that worked in both English and Arabic. No Arabic font matched the English lettering, so I built the Arabic out of pieces of four Latin letters.
The Project
Solitaire serves both English and Arabic speaking customers, so the logo had to show both languages together on the storefront, labels, packaging and bags. The client wanted a single logo that held both languages, rather than two separate ones.
The English name is set in Liana, a connected script font by Natalia Vasilyeva for ParaType, with fine joins, loops and a light, feminine feel.
The Problem
Liana doesn’t have any Arabic characters.
The usual approach is to pick the closest Arabic font and set the name in it, but that rarely works. Arabic and Latin fonts are built differently, with different stroke contrast, different endings and a different rhythm. Put a standard Arabic font next to a delicate Latin script and it looks like two different brands standing side by side.
Both scripts here are cursive, which you’d think would help, but it doesn’t really. A Latin script font joins its letters because the designer chose to. In Arabic the letters always join, and each one changes shape depending on where it sits in the word.
What I Did
Instead of looking for an Arabic font, I cut up Liana’s own letters and rebuilt Arabic letters from the pieces. The name in Arabic has seven letters, and I built all seven from four Latin ones: i, l, g and u.
- س (sīn) comes from the lowercase u, which already has the row of teeth joined along the bottom that sīn needs
- ي (yā’) and ت (tā’) come from the i, with its dot rebuilt into two dots below for yā’ and two above for tā’
- ل (lām) comes from the l, with the loop opened out into the straight stroke and curve that lām needs
- و (wāw) comes from the g, with the bowl becoming the head and the descender becoming the tail
- ر (rā’) also comes from the g, with everything cut away except the descending stroke
Three of the seven Arabic letters come from the i. Arabic builds several of its letters from the same short stroke with the dots moved around, and Liana’s i is a short stroke with a dot above it, so it worked as a starting point for all of them.
Sīn took two attempts. My first version used three i‘s with the dots removed, and it worked, but three identical strokes looked too mechanical at logo size. The u gave me the same row of teeth with a bit of natural variation, and it joins along the bottom the way sīn does.
The dots were important. In Arabic, dots are often the only difference between one letter and another, and a dot in the wrong place spells a different word. Liana already had a dot drawn in its own style, so I just moved it where each letter needed it.
There were a few rules I wouldn’t bend. The Arabic had to be correct Arabic, with every letter in its proper form and joined where Arabic joins. It had to be easy to read, however stylish it looked. And the English and Arabic had to sit together as equals, with matching weight, so neither one looked like an afterthought.
There’s a common shortcut where Latin letters get decorated with hooks and dots to look vaguely Arabic. To someone who reads Arabic, that just looks like nonsense. This logo was built the other way around. The pieces came from the Latin, but what came out is real Arabic that spells the brand’s name.
Why It Matters
Customers might not think about it consciously, but they notice. A carefully drawn English logo beside a default Arabic font tells Arabic-speaking customers they weren’t much of a priority, and they see it on the storefront before anyone has said a word to them.
I read and write Arabic and have been typesetting right-to-left languages since 2005, so when a logo needs to work in both scripts, I can design it and check it myself.
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