Almost every brand operating in Egypt has to work in two scripts. Almost every one of them treats the Arabic as a translation problem handled at the end. It is not a translation problem. It is a typographic and structural one. Teams make the decisions badly and early, and no amount of good copywriting rescues them later.
Arabic is not Latin with different shapes
Start with what the script does not have. There are no capitals, so you cannot use case to build hierarchy the way a Latin layout does. Hierarchy has to come from weight, size, color and space instead. A headline style copied straight from the English system usually reads as underpowered in Arabic.
Size matching is the next trap. Setting Arabic and Latin at the same point size makes the Arabic look small and thin, because the meaningful measure in Arabic is not cap height. Match the two optically. In practice the Arabic often runs a point or two larger. Give it noticeably more line spacing, because the deep descenders and stacked marks need the room.
Forbid three things outright in the guidelines. Never apply faux bold or artificial condensing to Arabic, because the joins distort and any native reader sees a mistake. Never letterspace Arabic, since the letters are connected and spacing them apart genuinely breaks words. And never set long body copy in a Kufi display face. Kufi belongs in headlines and logotypes. Naskh belongs in paragraphs, and readers move through Naskh faster.
Choosing the type pair for a bilingual brand system
The best outcome is a superfamily where designers drew the Arabic and the Latin together, so proportion, weight and color on the page already agree. Several foundries specializing in Arabic type sell matched families. For web work there are solid free faces such as Cairo, Tajawal, Almarai and the Noto Arabic families. They pair reasonably with common Latin text faces. Google Fonts Knowledge has practical guidance on pairing and legibility.
What does not work is choosing the two you like separately and hoping. If budget allows, commission a bespoke Arabic companion to an existing Latin wordmark. It is money well spent, because it is the single element that will appear on everything you ever produce.
The logo and the layout
Do not transliterate the logotype letter by letter. The goal is an Arabic mark with the same personality and the same visual weight, not a phonetic copy. Getting there usually takes a specialist rather than a general designer with a font list. Then decide which version leads in which market. Write the lockup rule down, including which script sits first when both appear together.
Layout mirroring follows a simple set of rules. Mirror the layout, the navigation, the alignment, progress indicators and directional arrows. Do not mirror the logo, photographs, or anything that would read as reversed. Numerals need an explicit decision too. Egyptian commercial material generally uses Western digits while other markets mix. Inconsistency here is the most common thing we find in an audit.
Make the system usable by your team
A system only works if the people who produce the daily material can follow it. Keep the rulebook short and give every rule a visual example in both scripts. Supply ready templates for the formats you use most, such as social posts, proposals and email headers. Our piece on a design system your marketing team will actually use shows how to keep it light enough to survive a busy month.
Consistency also builds trust with buyers abroad. Mismatched Arabic and Latin lockups read as careless. Our piece on trust signals US buyers look for covers what else they notice.
Last, staff two writers rather than one translator. A brand voice defined only in English and then translated always arrives in Arabic sounding like a document, not a brand. Building both halves of a system so they carry equal weight is the standard our brand identity and design team works to on every bilingual project.
