Style combination · Pairs well

Contemporary Arabic × Machine-Age Simplified Arabic Type

Its digital successor: dual-script families pair Arabic with a matched Latin while keeping the firm baseline, even colour and reduced stacking that simplification made familiar. 29LT's UA Neo (2013), detached revivals of Khattar's Unified Arabic, is where the two touch.

From the research on Machine-Age Simplified Arabic Type

Mix them and make something Contemporary Arabic Machine-Age Simplified Arabic Type

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Machine-Age Simplified Arabic Type, their arrangement from Machine-Age Simplified Arabic Type, the finish from Machine-Age Simplified Arabic Type. 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 Machine-Age Simplified Arabic Type

Type from Contemporary Arabic: Humanist sans
Grotesque & neo-grotesque
Colour from Contemporary Arabic: Monochrome
Limited spot colours
Form from Machine-Age Simplified Arabic Type: Rectilinear
Ornament-free
Composition from Machine-Age Simplified Arabic Type: Column grid
Horror vacui

Contemporary Arabic avoids horror vacui: this is where the two pull against each other.
Surface from Machine-Age Simplified Arabic Type: Paper & letterpress bite
Flat

The type

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

Display · Contemporary Arabic

Grid

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

Text · Machine-Age Simplified Arabic Type

Arabic redrawn for the machine rather than the reed pen. From 1947 reformers cut down the four positional forms of each letter: Nasri Khattar's Unified Arabic gave every letter one shape, set apart like Latin type in its detached print form, and Linotype's Simplified Arabic (1959, made with Beirut's al-Hayat) mostly two, so a newspaper fount fitted one 90-channel magazine; ASV Codar in Morocco gave the vowels letters of their own. Flat-based, even and with few ligatures, it became the common face of Arab newspapers and lives on in Windows system fonts.

Newsreader; Machine-Age Simplified Arabic Type used Mrowa-Linotype Simplified Arabic (Kamel Mrowa, Nabih Jaroudi and Walter Tracy for Linotype & Machinery; Series 2 with 3, 1959) and its redesign by Jaroudi, Series 8 with 9 (1962), named Yakout in 1967 and Intertype Abridged Arabic

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Contemporary Arabic, with a counter-accent from Machine-Age Simplified Arabic Type. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Contemporary Arabic & Dual-Script Type Design Machine-Age Simplified Arabic Type

#f7f6f2 ground · 36%
#141414 ink · 14%
#c1272d accent · 18%
#1d4f9e accent · 14%
#0f6e6e accent · 10%
#cfc6b0 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f7f6f2;
  --ink: #141414;
  --accent-1: #c1272d;
  --accent-2: #1d4f9e;
  --accent-3: #0f6e6e;
  --accent-4: #cfc6b0;
  --font-display: "Fira Sans", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Newsreader", serif;
}

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.

Machine-Age Simplified Arabic Type: Arabic is a living script and the script of the Qur'an, and simplified type was long resisted for books, government work and the Qur'an, so do not set Qur'anic verses, hadith or the names of God and the Prophet in reduced or detached forms, or use them as texture. Set Arabic right to left with correct joining, never pass off the disconnected letters of a software error as Unified Arabic, have every word read by a fluent reader, and do not present script reform as the correction of a deficient script: the Academy of the Arabic Language in Cairo rejected ASV Codar in 1958, and the type historian Titus Nemeth calls the survival of simplified forms in digital fonts a legacy of technical compromise that digital type no longer needs.

The two styles

A bilingual Latin and Arabic type specimen sheet on an off-white background features oversized black Nūr and نور lettering, gray sample headlines, and four font weights. Fine rules divide character sets, five circular colour swatches, letter-construction diagrams, and sample sizes, with restrained red and teal accents.

2004–present · Middle East & North Africa, Western Europe, Global / networked Contemporary Arabic & Dual-Script Type Design A twenty-first-century type culture that redraws Arabic as a family matched to a Latin companion in weight, proportion and contrast, so the two scripts can share a page, screen or sign as equals. The Khatt Foundation's Typographic Matchmaking (2007) did much to launch it, and foundries such as 29LT and TPTQ Arabic carried it forward. It favours low-contrast Kufi- and Naskh-derived forms, a firm horizontal baseline and mirrored grids for identities, wayfinding and interfaces. 1947–present · Middle East & North Africa Machine-Age Simplified Arabic Type Arabic redrawn for the machine rather than the reed pen. From 1947 reformers cut down the four positional forms of each letter: Nasri Khattar's Unified Arabic gave every letter one shape, set apart like Latin type in its detached print form, and Linotype's Simplified Arabic (1959, made with Beirut's al-Hayat) mostly two, so a newspaper fount fitted one 90-channel magazine; ASV Codar in Morocco gave the vowels letters of their own. Flat-based, even and with few ligatures, it became the common face of Arab newspapers and lives on in Windows system fonts.