Explore Arabic Fonts

Licensing varies by font. Check each font's license before commercial use. Many fonts are available under open-source licenses, but always verify before using in commercial projects.

Explore Calligraphy Styles →

Styles affect layout and overall "look"; fonts affect letter shapes and readability.

Fonts vs Styles: What's the Difference? →

Learn when to pick a font first vs. when to start with a style preset.

Choosing an Arabic Font

Six fonts, chosen deliberately

This collection is short on purpose. There are hundreds of Arabic typefaces available, and presenting all of them would make the choice harder rather than easier. These six were selected to cover the range of work people actually bring to a tool like this — readable text, formal documents, brand marks, decorative artwork, dense reference material, and bilingual interfaces — without redundancy.

Every one is released under the SIL Open Font License, which means you can use any of them commercially, in a logo, or on a product you sell, without a fee and without attribution. That was a selection criterion, not a coincidence: a font you cannot use in the project you are designing for is not a useful option.

Three questions that narrow it to one

First: will this be read, or looked at? If someone has to work through more than a few words, you need a text face — Amiri, Scheherazade, or Lateef. If the text is a name, a title, or a mark that will be recognised rather than read, the display faces open up.

Second: how small will it get? Test at the smallest size the design will actually use, not the size you are designing at. Arabic relies on dots to distinguish letters, and those disappear first in small print, embroidery, and engraving. Cairo survives reduction better than anything else here. Third: does it sit next to Latin text? If so, match stroke weight before you consider anything else — weight mismatch is what viewers notice in a bilingual lockup.

What separates the text faces

Amiri, Scheherazade, and Lateef are all Naskh-derived text faces and the differences between them are subtle but consequential. Amiri is a revival of the nineteenth-century Bulaq Press type and carries the most formal register, with the most thorough handling of vocalised text — the right choice for books, certificates, and academic work.

Scheherazade is slightly wider and more open, holding legibility further down the size scale, and it covers the extended Arabic script used for Persian, Urdu, Kurdish, and others. Lateef, from the same design house, is drawn more compactly for dense settings — footnotes, dictionaries, captions — where a lot of text must fit without closing up.

What separates the display faces

Reem Kufi and Aref Ruqaa look equally striking in a preview and behave completely differently in production. Reem Kufi is geometric, with even stroke weight that survives being embroidered, engraved, cut from vinyl, or reduced to an icon. It is the reason it dominates contemporary Arabic branding.

Aref Ruqaa carries far more calligraphic gesture, with the stroke contrast and dramatic verticals of the classical tradition — which is exactly why it fails where Reem Kufi succeeds. Its thin strokes are the first casualty of any difficult reproduction method. Use it for artwork viewed at size, and use Reem Kufi for anything that has to work everywhere. Cairo sits apart from both: a modern face built for screens and bilingual systems, neutral by design.