Diriyah City Arabic Logo Adaptation

The Diriyah destination brand turned to us at Tarek Atrissi Design to create the Arabic wordmark adaptation of its English wordmark logo. Our extensive experience in brand adaptation to Arabic, built over decades of helping international brands translate their logos into Arabic while considering cultural nuances, allowed us to tackle this project successfully and create an Arabic typographic logo that became one of the most visible brands in Saudi Arabia.

As with every project involving logo adaptation to Arabic, the main challenge was to create a typographic wordmark that echoes the design characteristics of the English logo, without compromising legibility in Arabic, while maintaining respect for the nature of the Arabic script and its proportions and authenticity.

The design process started by exploring different creative approaches, manually sketching various Arabic versions of the logo, inspired by both classic and modern Arabic calligraphic styles. The best sketches were digitized and refined, incorporating key design features from the Latin typography. The final Arabic logo was crafted to incorporate the triangular forms of the English logo in Arabic in a seamless and legible way, maintaining the same rhythm, visual style, and overall optical sizes as the original logo. Both logos ended up matching perfectly, allowing the brand to use them in bilingual contexts while maintaining a similar functional and visual impact.

Samples of the usage of the Arabic wordmark—as part of the bilingual brand—are shown on this page on various printed items, such as business cards and magazine covers.

The Arabic logo was used in a massive local and international campaign, promoting Diriyah as the up-and-coming destination of Saudi Arabia. Shown below is the wordmark in use at Riyadh International Airport.