Unified Arabic, LLC

Traditional Arabic type is a poor imitation of the cursive Arabic calligraphy that evolved over centuries and at a time when all books, documents, and correspondence were penned by hand and no copying machines existed. This brought about a variety in the shape of each alphabetic character and hundreds of ligatures, which are letters superimposed on top of each other. It was done to facilitate and speed up the cursive process of writing—which had become a sort of shorthand—and of copying, which was then a profitable enterprise.

When this intricately written Arabic was cast into type, it was found necessary to cast more than a thousand type bodies to make the printed page readable, although the Arabic alphabet consists of only 28 letters.

Prior to the Gutenberg invention of movable type in the Fifteen Century, the Arabic script was more widely used than its Roman counterpart. But the Arabs failed to simplify and adapt their alphabet to machine composition as the West had done.

With the advent of Unified Arabic (UA) (TM), we now have, as the Western world, two alphabets: one for handwriting and calligraphy, and another in type forms for printing—both fully compatible with each other. It must be noted here that the similarity between the two is greater in Arabic than it is in English, French, or Spanish.

Unified Arabic is the very same familiar 28-letter alphabet, minus the superfluous variants and ligatures. What Nasri Khattar, designer of Unified Arabic did, was to eliminate the unnecessary flourishes, confusing curlicues, and the twisted variants needed in the cursive handwriting, and to standardize the letter forms. Each of the new characters consists of the essential identifying characteristics of the old variant forms of that letter, with the result that the emergent design is quintessentially more Arabic, more identifiable, and more readable than the old contorted shapes.