Designers are finally doing justice to the complex, contextual alphabet with a fresh approach to Arabic fonts and digital typography

This article was originally published on design.google.

Arabic script is beautiful, and imbued with a rich history; the alphabet used today can be traced to classic texts that date back over a thousand years. The language itself has evolved over time, but modernizing Arabic typography — translating the intricacies of this uniquely complex, calligraphic style into a digital format — has been a major challenge. Arabic readers and writers deserve resources that allow them to communicate completely online, with font options that do justice to their written texts; designers like Mohamed Gaber and Khaled Hosny are working to fully realize the expression of this ever-growing group by ushering in a new era of Arabic type.

Context is everything: The specific challenges of digitizing Arabic type

The distinct qualities of written Arabic are rooted in calligraphy. Like the cursive writing many of us are taught in grade school, each letter changes based on the letters around it — these myriad combos, along with deceptively decorative features like ligatures and diacritic marks, are inherently complicated to mechanize, whether in metal type or in code.

“Arabic script has a great and extensive history of development and refinement, and this is reflected in how many forms a letter can take, depending on its context,” explains Egypt-based type designer Hosny. “There are lots of tricks to balance the black and white in the line, or even the page as a whole. But these things are hard to automate, and trying to emulate calligraphy in type often backfires.”

In the centuries when Latin typefaces were blossoming, Arabic printing was comparatively neglected. Foundries of the twentieth century developed just a few dozen Arabic typefaces compared to the many hundreds of Latin designs.

The challenge of Arabic type design continued into the digital age. The limited collection of Arabic fonts included in early desktop computers and web browsers were dull and clumsy — sometimes missing characters and often riddled with errors. As the Arab-speaking world came online, this gap in type design became even more conspicuous, and people responded by inventing an ad hoc vernacular, transliterating Latin to Arabic in emails, chats, and text messages; for example, “3” would be used to represent “ع”; and عين would be written as “3ain,” instead of the more formal transliteration of “Aain.”

Balancing Arabic identity and Latin language traditions

The number of web users in the Arab world was estimated by the UN to have grown from about 46 million users in 2007, to over 170 million as of last year. For Gaber, a type designer in Cairo, this rapid increase in readers fuels a clear mission: develop free web fonts that faithfully and expressively render Arabic online that everyone can use. His initial practice began with a focus on extending existing Latin designs to the Arabic script, and three of his projects are the most widely used Arabic typefaces in Google Fonts: El Messiri, Lemonada, and Cairo.

Maintaining a sense of balance and consistency between each letter is a painstaking task, but ultimately necessary to the success of a type family. Gaber says the goal is “to create an Arabic typeface that matches the Latin without bending the Arabic letters or ‘Latinizing’ them — to maintain the classic rules of Arabic lettering while matching the Latin type.” Cairo’s Latin and Arabic characters are so neatly aligned that their strokes can be woven together and layered on top of one another, creating an elegant union of the two scripts to visually suggest that both languages are being spoken simultaneously.

Cairo’s crisp, minimal, sans-serif design is useful for many contexts. In lighter weights and smaller sizes, it’s highly legible as body text; at larger sizes and heavier weights it cuts a distinct form widely praised as a prime display font — check out the title text for the Almost There poster above — and was even named one of the best display typefaces of 2016 by Granshan, an organization founded to recognize excellence in non-Latin typography.

Even after a font is published, the work continues through refinement and expansion. Over the past year Gaber has reviewed the Google Fonts catalog of Arabic type to ensure their fidelity, coherence, and functionality — especially when it comes to subtle points like the placement of diacritic marks and ligatures — and these updates will be available soon.

The impact of OpenType on the future of Arabic typography

A decade ago the Arab world had no choice but to read and write digital text in inadequate, oversimplified web fonts. By leveraging all of the advanced features in the OpenType font format, designers today are proving that it’s possible to create fresh, efficient, and truly engaging digital Arabic typography. Hosny is quick to acknowledge that even the most thoughtful Arabic type design must harbor certain concessions and compromises, but the dream of achieving the delicate balance between hand-drawn heritage and software-centric progress is finally coming true — with more exciting developments to come.

Want to use more Arabic type? There are now more than fourteen Arabic type families available in Google Fonts, Docs, and Slides — each with matching Latin characters to ensure a consistent appearance in multilingual documents.

Explore typographic culture and discover fonts for your next project with Google Design’s Type & Typography Collection, curated by Google Fonts.

Modernizing Arabic Type for a Digital Audience was originally published in Google Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Allo sticker sets balance the universal and unique

At first glance, stickers are easy to dismiss. They’re small, often silly. A miniature image of a sloth surfing a pizza slice doesn’t necessarily prompt deep artistic contemplation. But each image is in fact a microcosm of expression, packing an emotional punch into an illustration no bigger than a thumbprint.

Last December, Google art director Jennifer Daniel moderated a discussion between sticker illustrator Domitille Collardey, Anyways art director and sticker commissioner Alice Moloney, and Google design producer Emily Meinhardt. The quartet discussed sticker inspiration, the importance of character development, and the process of creating more than 500 custom stickers for Google Allo. Along the way, they revealed a few fascinating truths about this tiny art form.

Read the rest of the story at design.google to learn why stickers aren’t emojis, how the sticker-design team deals with swear words, why Batman would never say ‘LOL’, and much, much more.

Q&A on Designing Allo Stickers was originally published in Google Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Digital natives are redesigning the way we build tech one tap at a time.

By Justin Barber

Whether you find it menacing or miraculous, there’s no denying that the mobile web’s most enduring imprint on contemporary society will be the dissolution of what it means to be on and offline. For digital adopters — those who arrived at tapping by way of clicking — the ramifications mostly revolve around matters of integration, like convenience and time. For digital natives — those who grew up with ubiquitous computing — the consequences are often more complex, reflecting their identity and shaping the way they communicate. Herein lies the challenge for designers: How do we build a responsible, effective ecosystem for a world we may not fully understand yet? Acquiring cultural competence is a start. By truly understanding the behavioral shifts and evolving language in our digital spaces, we can begin to design appropriately for the problems we see now and anticipate the potential of what is to come.

One of the most notable behavioral distinctions between digital adopters and natives is the latter’s preference for interaction over passive consumption. That difference between arriving at a destination versus interacting is evident not just in the products we use but also in the way we talk about them — you might be on Facebook (where you find friends), but you use Snapchat (where you add friends). You might browse Instagram or Twitter, but you swipe right on Tinder.

In a roundtable discussion of the latest trends in design tools, Google’s Matias Duarte observed that “it’s much more positive, engaging, delightful, and stimulating” to directly manipulate something instead of clicking and waiting for a response. And yet so many of today’s interfaces maintain this mindset, mistakenly assuming a finger is the same as a mouse while the very form of mobile — small and light in our hands — begs for a far more intimate and tactile interaction, like pull-to-refresh or fling-to-dismiss.

Snapchat was the first mainstream product to extrapolate this principle beyond individual features by structuring its app entirely around gestures and direct manipulation (like hold-to-record/reveal and swipe-to-navigate), the ultimate non-discoverable affordances. This approach prompted digital adopters, who only recently grew out of needing skeuomorphic visual cues but still rely on a map or menu to orient themselves, to deem the app “unintuitive” (the ultimate UX insult).

But for digital natives, who’ve leapfrogged the need for visual affordances altogether, every interface is intuitive. They don’t need a map detailing each direction — they’re comfortable navigating with only a compass.

But that’s just a part of the story. Visit design.google.com to finish reading about the ways that digital natives are reshaping UX design, from collapsing conventions around chronology and time to developing new methods for self-expression.

No Such Thing as Offline was originally published in Google Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How the new Pixel phones find depth in the design details

By Daniel Walsh and Conor O’Sullivan

With the Pixel phone, the first in a new line of Google products released this fall, we made it our mission to ensure that every element of the user experience created a consistent tone — one that not only expressed the Google brand in new dimensions, but also stayed true to our core design principles of simplicity, intelligence, customization, and trustworthiness. By showcasing the best of what Google has to offer, we hoped to target a demographic interested in a premium Android device with a confidently minimal experience. The team decided to focus on two major areas of the Pixel experience — wallpapers and soundscape — to achieve this goal.

To ensure consistency across other products and areas of the company, we held working sessions with the Material Design team and Creative Lab, as well as other teams in San Francisco, LA, and New York. We developed concepts that utilized some of Google’s new and emerging technologies, while working within our meticulous engineering and performance benchmarks to emphasize intelligence, performance, high craft, and restraint.

Wallpapers

For a device wallpaper to be successful, it must clearly express the company’s brand while functioning as a passive layer behind the UI, and, most importantly, allow for the user’s self expression. By creating experiences that respond to and reflect the user’s context — transforming their surroundings into dynamic content and bringing a layer of intelligence to what is often a static background — we created a suite of wallpapers that go beyond those base requirements for success.

Pixel evolves the art direction established with earlier Nexus products — namely the abstracted color compositions and satellite imagery — and enhances the way those images interact with and respond to the user. To achieve this, we partnered with the Google Earth team to create models of iconic, global landmarks using Google’s 3D geometry technology. Incorporating 3D scenes rather than just flat imagery, showcases the depth and scale of these natural and manmade landmarks without draining battery or increasing data usage. For example, Your World provides a stunning, globe-level view of your location, and incorporates real-time data from daily life. Horizon, another wallpaper in this series, dramatizes the battery cycle of your phone from charge to recharge — as your battery drains, you’re presented with an increasingly glorious sunset that transitions into a rising moon — creating a live experience that is aesthetically pleasing, highly personalized, and imparts a bit of that Google magic. Expressing the user’s context as much as possible, offers simple beauty while hinting at deeper levels of data and information.

Aurora Timelapse, the wallpaper that will be on every Pixel phone out of the box, uses current location, time, and weather conditions to create subtle but lush colorscapes that respond dynamically to your location. The composition of this wallpaper took hard work, as we wanted to ensure that the horizon would line up perfectly with the back-plate of the phone. We also needed to develop a robust color palette to show off our rich AMOLED screens while complementing our mostly primary-colored Google app icons. The final result is a set of live data wallpapers that balance simplicity and intelligence without creating unnecessary clutter and noise.

To contrast and complement the geo-based wallpapers, we also expanded our work with artists and photographers whose style and range map thematically to Google’s brand — covering themes like exploration, science, and discovery. Jamie Chung’s exclusive Pixel series, New Elements, is an investigation into raw, elemental materials. He photographed water, vapor, iron ore, and ferrofluid to produce a striking range of imagery that is at once intelligent, graphic, and quirky. In contrast, Zack Seckler’s series, Sky High, observes stunning moments of coastal wildlife. Zack’s aerial shots of the South African marshlands build off of our past satellite imagery while adding a more emotional narrative.

But that’s only half the story. Visit design.google.com to read (and hear) the remarkable account of how Pixel phones were designed to cut through the noise and express Google’s brand through sound.

Sound and Vision was originally published in Google Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.