Breaking the language barrier – Neue Helvetica Arabic

Nadine Chahine is a type designer and Arabic specialist for international type foundry Linotype GmbH. Nadine recently released her latest latin adaptation, Neue Helvetica Arabic.

The design is intended to be a companion to Helvetica Neue, and while the typeface was met much praise, there were an equal amount of unsure readers and a handful of slamming reviews.

Nadine describes the typeface as “a mono-linear design with very little contrast“, and yet Helvetica is neither of these.

Two key points of the design brief were;

• Design a typeface that would be the Arabic companion to Neue Helvetica.
• The Arabic version would be true to Arabic script aesthetics and be able to function on its own as well.

Admittedly I know nothing about Arabic typography, but when reading on, these objectives seem destined to conflict.

From a western perspective it seems people are expecting the same variation in stroke weights and shapes to be mirrored in Arabic type, however this is apparently not what is expected in the east.

Readers who are not familiar with Arabic are usually looking to see the same curves of Latin reproduced in the Arabic. This doesn’t work.

Every script has its own logic and we can’t used the curves of one to make the other… There are features that are may not be desirable to take into other scripts.

What do you think?

To quote Nadine in her article, “Is it possible to bring Swiss neutrality into the Middle East?” Is this Helvetica? or just another typeface.

Lots of interesting points can be found in Nadines original post here.