1. You write very well, and I mean it. It is heart-warming to see a designer really thinking her design out.

2. I totally agree with what John Hudson said: ‘capturing the idiom of a design in multiple scripts isn’t always possible or even, in my opinion, desirable.’ I would even put the ‘desirable’ part aside. I think it simply is not possible. Text, display, and neutral cannot be combined in an Arabic fount, and this is because ‘text’ Arabic is Naskhi, while ‘display’ Arabic is all the others (for the Levant, the Arabian Peninsula, and Egypt at least). Of course, a mannered Naskhi could manage to be both text and display, but neutral (which in our heads stems from the orthonormal) is not inherent to Naskhi, but rather to Kufi.

My point is that the best compromise we can come up with to combine text, display, and neutral would be a text display that is neutral only at the most rational or academic level, that level which does not see with its eye but with its brain, and which understands that the orthonormal is not necessarily neutral, nor the neutral necessarily orthonormal. This brain, however, is disrespectful to the eye, because the eye is naïve. It knows its semantics and only those. The problem is, the brain must always pay respect to the eye and where the semantics of this eye come from. This is why combining the three qualities is impossible.

What we Arabic type designers have to do, I think, is to come to terms with the absence of a point of intersection among the three, and to move on. In the case of Helvetica, I would have discarded of the ambition for a text fount, and would have focused on preserving the humanist orthonormality of Helvetica (I am not going to call it ‘neutrality’ anymore). This would have produced an outright Neo-Kufi fount, and there is nothing wrong with that.

3. One of the commentators asked for an example of a famous, popular Arabic fount. From what I have been observing, Boutrus Mourad’s GE SS Text is all over town, and so I would give that as an example of a famous, popular fount. Saying this sounds like anathema, of course, because no self-respecting designer would respect that flagrantly Latinised creature, but this is what the market likes and wants; orthonormal displays.

4. Of course, Nadine, you are being showered with criticism, some of it constructive, some of it otherwise, but Gibran - I think - said that only the tree that bears fruit is thrown with stones. My point is this; someone had to do Helvetica Neue Arabic, and I do not think that any one would have handled that mission with greater lucidity to its weight than you.

When I saw the cursive Arabic, the dots resemble a rounded diamond. Why not use a square or a diamond instead of a circle? Using round dots make it closer to Neuzeit Grotesk S than Helvetica.

Just by having avoided the obvious trap of doing a cut and paste job from latin letters does not automatically make it a good design.

As someone has written above, I also find it not that well drawn. But it is also very badly spaced, and the design of the letters is inconsistent in the different weights. It is not up to the same level of design quality as the latin Helvetica

But as a user, this is not the main concern, the following is. The text of the presentation says:

“Arabic calligraphic styles are many and some are more suited for headlines, others for text. Helvetica functions on both platforms so the Arabic needs to do so as well.”

This is the fundamental problem with this Helvetica Arabic. It is not a “Naskh-Kufi” hybrid. It is dominantly a modern Kufi with few (inconsistent) Naskh design features. As a mostly-Kufi style of fonts, this family is unusable as type family for common text settings at reading size. It does not “function on both platforms”.

Of course Helvetica is very frequently used for setting text, not just headlines. Calling this Arabic family Helvetica Arabic will mislead designers who are not familiar with our abjad to think that this is an acceptable equivalent to Helvetica for setting texts in arabic, which it is not.

Because of this essential problem, the decision to call this font family Helvetica Arabic is either a badly informed decision or an irresponsible marketing strategy to use the fame of the name Helvetica.

Praise be to Ms Chahine to have the confidence to want to make an arabic companion (which we need) to a design classic like Helvetica, but I am disappointed, this font family is a result not successful both on the idea and the design.

But I like some of your other fonts, please don’t give up!

Absolutely. I’m not terribly familiar with Arabic scripts, but I often see the same mistakes made with contemporary Japanese typefaces, where elements of latin letterforms are transposed to Japanese kana, and it hardly ever works. There are Japanese typefaces with latin serifs, and although these sometimes make for interesting display faces, they really come off as little more than parodies.

- Contrast:
The description of the Arabic typeface says that it is mono-linear which is true of the overall feel of the typeface. However, it of course has thins where necessary. If you first look at the Latin and compare the numbers 2 and 7 as in the sample, the 2 is almost fully mono-linear, while the 7 has thinning where the the horizontal and diagonal strokes are coming very close in direction, and would have closed up otherwise. This is is also found in the top arches of m, n, h, p, q, r etc. This is not found is characters such as the c, s, v, x, y, z…

So: The Latin has obvious thinning of characters were 2 strokes are getting to be very close in direction.

Solution: The Arabic also has this in the cases that 2 strokes are getting close in direction (look at the way the Beh joins to another Beh). This is not obvious in these samples but you can test it on the Linotype site. The Arabic has less of this kind of situation, and so has those thinnings less often but that is in its nature.

Conclusion: The Arabic has more c and s type of curves than n curves. This gives a different rhythm of contrast.

- Shapes:
Readers who are not familiar with Arabic are usually looking to see the same curves of Latin reproduced in the Arabic.

This doesn’t work.

Every script has its own logic and we can’t used the curves of one to make the other. John raises an excellent point (as always): There are features that are may not be desirable to take into other scripts.

The Arabic counterpart to Neue Helvetica is its companion, not its slave. It is meant to do in Arabic what the first does in Latin. It’s not about having the same curves (Arabic is often more organic), but about the way the typeface speaks to its readers. I do believe that the Arabic has the same tone of voice as the Latin, just don’t expect it to wear the same cloths.

There are enough example of botched logo designs in the Middle East (by designers of various nationalities) where the designers have taken the curves of the Latin and chopped-rotated-flipped-pasted them to make Arabic letters. This makes the Arabic look very close to the Latin in terms of details, but in reality it is often only misshaped forms and nothing more than a typographic Frankenstein. There’s examples of this on my blog.

And if I just copied the curves of the Latin and constructed my Arabic out of those, what would I do next? Design a Times Arabic and slap serifs on it? No. Some lines are not meant to be crossed and we need to accept that different scripts are different. Sounds simple, but many miss on that.

In all of my presentations about the relationship of Latin and Arabic, I always say: The Arabic needs to stay Arabic, and the Latin stays Latin. If you design both at the same time (like in my Koufiya), then you get a better fit. But here we deal with a different design brief.

I think different people approach this issue differently. After all, this is design and not math.

If there are other issues that you would like me to clarify please let me know. I hope this helped to shed some light.