Dubai—not just a city, now also a font

The city of Dubai is famous for many things: wealth, architecture, and artificial islands.

Dubai has just earned a further distinction. It has become the only city in the world to have its own font in the Microsoft Office systems.

Dubai Executive Media Council said that there was a dearth of high-quality Arabic fonts. While people using English letters can choose from thousands of free fonts, only a few were offered in Arabic.

“For Dubai to take the initiative in the world of digital fonts, we looked at the Arabic fonts available across the world at the moment, we found that there is a gap between Arabic and English (font) designs,” said Dubai Executive Council Assistant Secretary General Ahmed Al-Mahri.

“Dubai wanted to prove to the world that it does not only consider the Arabic language but that Dubai is made up of several nationalities, over 200 nationalities live in Dubai in harmony; so Dubai wanted to launch to the world 23 languages through the creation of Dubai font,” he said.

Microsoft worked with global type foundry Monotype and font designer Nadine Chahine for a year and a half to develop the Dubai font, said Microsoft’s Applications and Services Regional Director Ihsan Anabtawi.

“It was designed with a focus on reading on different sized screens and today we are launching it world-wide through the Office 365 platform to more than 100 million people on different systems,” he said.

The font is designed to scale well for screens of all sizes.

The United Arab Emirates will adopt the font for all government correspondence to ensure that it becomes widely dispersed.