Arabic Revival font is a new Arabic typeface family designed in 4 weights: Light, Regular, Semi bold and Bold. It is a versatile typeface with excellent legibility, and is suitable for use both in headlines and body text, making it an excellent choice as an Arabic font to be used in editorial design context. The font is based on a hybrid design of the “Naskh" calligraphic style and the “kufi al masahif” calligraphic style.
The typeface design was a result of a long research project that studied the work of Muhyeddine Al-Labbad, the late Egyptian designer who left with his work a considerable influence on the history of graphic design practice in the Arab world. One of Al-Labbad’s most striking projects that we came across while studying his archive is the typographic experiment he art directed to create a headline font to be used in the “Kitab fi Jareeda” publication, launched by Unesco in the late 1990s. The typeface had a unique style and personality that presented an Arabic font that is distinct from the available arabic fonts in the market today; yet it was a typeface that has unfortunately died with the end of the Kitab Fi Jareeda publication, and was never developed further to respond to the design and technological needs of Arabic typography today. With the goal of celebrate the work of Muhyeddine Al-Labbad, we have aimed at reviving this typeface by taking a new approach of redesigning it: Redrawing it in a more polished and complete way while trying to maintain its overall character; digitising it properly and developing it into a complete family; expanding its character set to be fully functional in Arabic and Farsi. Further work was done to design a latin matching typeface, making the font a bilingual font available in 4 weights.
Days prior to its release, the typeface was adopted as the headline, sub-headlines and pull out quotes font to be used by the Lebanese newspaper, Al-Itihad, which published between 2017 and 2019. The typeface proved to be an excellent choice for an Arabic newspaper, and further fine tuning and design adjustments were made to the font to make it perform better in print. After a limited period of exclusivity for the newspaper, the Arabic Revival typeface is back to be available as a retail font for public licensing. It remains an ideal font choice in the contexts of branding, exhibition design, editorial design or various graphic design usage.
More about the process and research behind designing the Revival Arabic typeface can be seen on the following link: https://www.atrissi.com/tribute-muhyeddine-al-labbad-arabic-revival-typeface/
