Designing for Arabic is not flipping English
Mirror the layout, not everything
- Mirror: navigation order, content blocks, progress and back/next arrows.
- Don’t mirror: logos, media controls, clocks, charts read left to right, and code or URLs.
- Mixed text: wrap English names and numbers so they don’t flip inside an Arabic sentence.
Arabic type needs room
Arabic letterforms are taller and more detailed than Latin ones at the same size. I raise line height (around 1.8 for body text), avoid letter spacing, and pick typefaces designed for Arabic, like Cairo on this site, instead of whatever fallback the browser finds.
Culture, not just direction
In the Tesco project the biggest gains weren’t technical: imagery of local families and food, offers rewritten in local expressions, and colours that felt fresh and trustworthy to the audience. That is the difference between translated and localized.
