Arabic is one of the most beautiful scripts humans ever made, and one of the worst treated in digital products. Open ten Arabic apps and you’ll find the same font, at the wrong size, with line heights borrowed from English, doing its best to survive.
This is a practical guide to not doing that.
Why Arabic type behaves differently
Connected script, no capital letters, letters that change shape by position, dots and diacritics that need vertical room. Every one of these has a UI consequence: hierarchy can’t rely on capitalization, tight line heights clip diacritics, and letter-spacing (tracking) is simply forbidden, it breaks the connections that make Arabic readable.
Choosing a UI font
What to look for: designed for screens (not print), multiple weights that actually differ, true italics don’t exist in Arabic so don’t fake them, and matching x-height logic with your Latin companion font.
Sizing and line height
Practical starting points I use:
- Body text: Arabic ~10-20% larger than the Latin equivalent
- Line height: 1.6-1.8 for Arabic body vs 1.4-1.5 for English
- Minimum sizes: nothing below 14px for Arabic body text, ever
Pairing Arabic and Latin
Bilingual interfaces show both scripts side by side constantly: names, brands, mixed content. The pair needs matched visual weight, aligned baselines (Arabic baselines behave differently), and coordinated sizing so neither script looks like the afterthought.
Hierarchy without capitals
English leans on caps and small caps for labels and hierarchy. Arabic can’t. The replacement toolkit: weight contrast, size contrast, color, and spacing. Design systems built on ALL-CAPS labels need rethinking, not translating.
The variable font advantage
Variable Arabic fonts solve the weight problem elegantly and cut load times for the notoriously heavy Arabic font files.
Typography is where “supports Arabic” and “designed for Arabic” look most different, literally. It’s a core part of what I cover in Arabic-first design, and usually the first thing I check in an Arabic UX audit.
Questions about your Arabic type stack? info@mikdam.com.
