“The font also supports the technology sector in general by offering a high-quality digital font with unique specifications in different countries of the world without any costs,” said Mahri.

“This is Dubai’s gift to the world,” he added during a Sunday launch ceremony for the font at Dubai’s recently-built Opera House.Īccording to officials, the font is the first font in Microsoft applications to be both developed by a city and to carry its name. The “high technical quality” of the Arabic font fills an important need for high-quality Arabic fonts, said Ahmad Al Mahri, the Dubai Executive Council’s assistant secretary general. Meanwhile, the Arabic typeface is a blend of two styles of Arabic calligraphy - ‘Naskh’ and ‘Muhaqqaq’.

The font also has four weights - light, regular, medium, and bold. “It’s a sans serif with a lot of humanist influence.”Īs well as English, some of the available variations for the Latin typeface include Spanish, German, French, and Italian alphabets. With its clean-cut, straightforward look, Chahin’s team took inspiration from Dutch design to create the Latin typeface. “It is a mean of expression, it is not the expression itself,” said Nadine Chahine, the font’s chief designer. The font is the product of a 18-month process by six-member team from Monotype, a US-based firm that has designed custom typefaces for British Airways, Vogue magazine, and Sony, among others. “I have personally overseen all the stages of the development of this font, from the first design sketches to the execution phase.” “We are confident that this new font and its unique specifications will prove popular among other fonts used online and in smart technologies across the world,” said Shaikh Hamdan. “The launch of the Dubai Font to the world is a very important step for us as part of our continuous efforts to be ranked first in the digital world,” said Shaikh Hamdan.

The Dubai Executive Council, chaired by Shaikh Hamdan Bin Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai, has instructed all the emirate’s government bodies to use the font. The font is available for all of the 100 million users of Microsoft’s Office 365 software, and downloaded in multiple formats on. With its simple, San Serif Latin typeface, and a modern, stripped-down Arabic script, the font can be used for 23 different languages. Dubai: Tired of Times New Roman and over Arial? Dubai’s government might have the solution.Ĭalled simply ‘Dubai Font,’ the new Arabic and Latin type styles are now freely available for the whole world to use.

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