Bree Arabic in progress

While looking over our font families, we often discuss which ones could benefit from something additional to serve our customers best: additional weights, more scripts, and the like. Bree is TypeTogether’s friendliest typeface, so as we moved forward with adding its Arabic counterpart we knew it should convey the same sympathy.

Bree Latin was clearly influenced by handwriting. With candid letter shapes like the one-storey “a” and “g”, choosing an Arabic style was easy: Bree Arabic had to be in Ruq’a style.

Ruq’a
Ruq’a is the calligraphic style used in handwritten Arabic because of its simple structure. It has an informal and friendly feel and is characterized by simple horizontal and vertical strokes.

In Ruq’a, unlike in Naskh, most words lie on the baseline (except when they end with letters like م ع ح). ‬This means that the final letter of a word almost never descends below the baseline and therefore all previous letters are on higher level(s).

Ruq’a is also an informal and flexible style in which to write, and for this reason many letters have alternate shapes. This is a feature we will be taking advantage of when designing Bree Arabic

Work in progress
Bree Arabic, designed by Azza Alameddine and Rabab Charafeddine, will retain the rounded and friendly feel of the Latin script by having smooth, uninterrupted strokes and will come in seven weights. It’s still a work in progress so stay tuned!