Arian

An Arabic typeface for the Electronic Publishing – The Arian Family

For decades, the Persian-born Naghi Naghashian has been working as a graphic designer and illustrator in Germany. Linotype is pleased to publish his first commercial Arabic typeface, Arian™.

Named after his mother, Naghi created the Arian typeface family after years of systematically analyzing the Arabic script. Many languages are written with the Arabic script, including the Arabic language itself, of course, but also Farsi (Persian), Kurdish, and Pashto. Urdu, a language spoken by hundreds of millions in Pakistan and India, is also written with the Arabic script.

The Arian design sought to fulfill the following needs:

A	Not just fulfill the demands of electronic communication, but to have been explicitly crafted for use in electronic media. Arian is not based on any pre-digital typefaces. It is not a revival. Rather, its forms were created with today’s technology in mind.
B	Suitability for multiple applications, in order to give it the widest potential acceptability.
C	Extreme legibility not only in small sizes, but also when the type is filtered or skewed, e.g., in Photoshop or Illustrator. Arian’s simplified forms may be artificial obliqued in InDesign, without any loss in quality for the effected text.
D	An attractive typographic image. Arian was developed for multiple languages and writing conventions.
E	With the highest degree of geometric clarity, and the necessary amount of calligraphic references. This typeface offers a fine balance between calligraphic tradition and the contemporary sans serif aesthetic now common in Latin typography. Arian is a quite versatile Arabic family, with five weights to offer: Light, Regular, Demi, Bold, Heavy.