Style combination · Pairs well

Contemporary Arabic × Baybayin Revival Graphics

Borrow dual-script matchmaking to give baybayin and its Latin companion matched weight, stroke and proportion on bilingual signs, labels and certificates, even where the Latin is set smaller as the reading line.

From the research on Baybayin Revival Graphics

Mix them and make something Contemporary Arabic Baybayin Revival Graphics

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Baybayin Revival Graphics, their arrangement from Baybayin Revival Graphics, the finish from Baybayin Revival Graphics. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

What each style brings

Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.

Contemporary Arabic & Dual-Script Type Design Baybayin Revival Graphics

Type from Contemporary Arabic: Humanist sans
Grotesque & neo-grotesque
Colour from Contemporary Arabic: Monochrome
Limited spot colours
Form from Baybayin Revival Graphics: Emblems & badges
Biomorphic curves
Composition from Baybayin Revival Graphics: Isolated object
Radial & concentric
Surface from Baybayin Revival Graphics: Painterly brushwork
Flat

Contemporary Arabic avoids painterly brushwork: this is where the two pull against each other.

The type

Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.

Display · Contemporary Arabic

Atlas

Fira Sans, standing in for Frutiger Arabic and Helvetica Arabic (Nadine Chahine)

Text · Baybayin Revival Graphics

The revival of baybayin, the precolonial Tagalog abugida, as a mark of Filipino identity. Its compact glyphs of hooks, bowls and loops, with kudlit marks above or below to change the vowel, rarely run as text: one character or a short word sits alone in an agency seal or a rayed sun, beside Latin on a peso note, or on a shirt, pendant or tattoo, in one ink, written with brush or pen, cut angular as if on bamboo, or redrawn as even-stroked digital type. Spread by free fonts online from the late 1990s and by Unicode from 2002, it is carried by state emblems and by diaspora calligraphers.

Space Mono; Baybayin Revival Graphics used The woodblock letterforms of the Doctrina Christiana (Manila, 1593), the model most modern baybayin fonts follow and Noto Sans Tagalog (Google Noto, SIL Open Font License; the 2022 build covers the Unicode 14 additions ra U+170D and pamudpod U+1715), the safe choice for real Unicode text

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Contemporary Arabic, with a counter-accent from Baybayin Revival Graphics. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Contemporary Arabic & Dual-Script Type Design Baybayin Revival Graphics

#f7f6f2 ground · 36%
#141414 ink · 14%
#c1272d accent · 18%
#0f6e6e accent · 14%
#0038a8 accent · 10%
#8c8c8c accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f7f6f2;
  --ink: #141414;
  --accent-1: #c1272d;
  --accent-2: #0f6e6e;
  --accent-3: #0038a8;
  --accent-4: #8c8c8c;
  --font-display: "Fira Sans", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Space Mono", monospace;
}

Use it with care

Contemporary Arabic & Dual-Script Type Design: Arabic must be set with correct contextual shaping and right-to-left direction; disconnected or reversed letters are a common and offensive error. Have every Arabic word checked by a fluent reader, avoid setting Qur'anic verses or the names of God and the Prophet as decorative texture, and commission or credit Arabic type designers rather than deriving Arabic glyphs from a Latin font.

Baybayin Revival Graphics: Baybayin is shared heritage, but its revival touches living Indigenous scripts and contested claims. Hanunóo, Buhid and Tagbanwa are still written by their communities, the Mangyan of Mindoro and the Tagbanwa and Pala'wan of Palawan, and their documents are on UNESCO's Memory of the World register (1999, 'Philippine Paleographs'); do not use their letters, ambahan verses or community signage as generic 'baybayin', and work with the communities and bodies such as the Mangyan Heritage Center when their scripts are involved. Baybayin wrote Tagalog and neighbouring lowland languages, and Kapampangan Kulitan has its own form and keepers, so do not present baybayin as the old writing of every Filipino people; even the bills moved in 2022 from a baybayin-only national script to baybayin 'and other indigenous and traditional writing systems'. 'Alibata', coined by Paul Versoza in 1914 from the Arabic alif-ba-ta, is a misnomer. Have every word spelled by a reader of the script: it writes syllables, so English spelled letter by letter, wrong or missing kudlit, mirrored glyphs and invented letters read as nonsense, and a tattoo makes the error permanent; write personal and organisation names in Latin unless the bearer has chosen a baybayin spelling. Image models cannot write baybayin and invent glyphs: leave the sign blank or set real text in a Unicode font (one that covers ra and the pamudpod, with the text entered as Unicode, not typed on Latin keys mapped to glyphs), and never present generated pseudo-script as genuine. Some of the best-known baybayin emblems carry politics: the CCP's triple ka is, in the Inquirer's words, a remnant of the Marcos New Society, and the ka in a rayed sun, attributed to the Katipunan, was flown by the July 2003 mutineers the press called the Magdalo Group and is the logo of the Magdalo party-list; do not use them as neutral Filipino marks. Agency seals, state insignia and the peso notes are official marks, so draw new emblems instead of copying them. Baybayin tattoos sit beside batok, the Indigenous hand-tapped tattooing whose patterns, placements and rituals belong to particular ethnolinguistic groups and their practitioners: a baybayin word does not license batok patterns or hand-tapping outside those lineages, and invented tribal motifs must not pass as Indigenous designs. Credit or commission Filipino calligraphers, type designers and tattoo artists.