Document Type : Original Article
Author
Graphic Department, Alexandria University, Alexandria, Egypt Digital Media And Communication, Effat University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
Abstract
The role of the visual communication designer is not limited to presenting information visually; rather, it involves achieving aesthetic values, harmony, and coherence among all design elements. Typography, as the visual representation of text, plays a crucial role in conveying the essence of content alongside its linguistic meaning. It also has a primary function in organizing page content and related components.Undoubtedly, the Arabic typeface library suffers from significant typographic scarcity, as designing Arabic letterforms is not an easy task. The designer must create four distinct forms for each letter to represent its positions within a word (initial, medial, final, and isolated). This study presents an applied experiment aimed at designing a display typeface intended for use in titles, enabling structured alignment whether in a single language or in bilingual layouts where titles combine two different writing systems.
The researcher designed the Arabic typeface “Wassat,” named for the proportional dominance of its central letter parts with wide internal counters, while the ascenders and descenders are short. The experiment sought to produce a typeface with short ascenders and descenders to allow designers to stack and align words vertically and control text blocks without creating unwanted gaps. At the same time, the expanded counters improve the legibility of the characters. This approach enhances the overall visual appearance of titles and provides designers with greater control over alignment and multilingual layouts to achieve a cohesive design. The researcher developed four primary weights of the typeface, which includes the Arabic alphabet, punctuation marks, diacritical marks, numerals, and the most commonly used symbols, bringing the total number of glyphs to approximately one thousand.
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