Droid Arabic Naskh & Kufi Typefaces were designed in 2010 for use in Google™ products such as Google Chrome™ and Android™.


Sample mock-up for the fonts used within Android phones.

Designed to complement the Latin, Greek and Cyrillic provided in the Droid Type Family, the Arabic matches the color, alignment and design detail of the Latin allowing them to be used together for multi-lingual typesetting.

This Naskh style is optimized for reading Arabic script on screen. The large ‘loop height’ and ‘tooth height’ help prevent readers from having to zoom web pages to a larger size in order to read them.

The traditional Naskh forms are softened for less formal documents such as periodicals and journals. The letterforms structures are based on the calligraphic grammatical rules of the Naskh writing style while drawn with a contemporary feel.

Below are few glyphs from the Droid Naskh font compared with traditional Naskh calligraphic letters. The glyphs in Droid Naskh follow the rules of the Naskh style with modifications to the loop size, contrast, and width of the glyphs which lends the font to be legible in small size on mobile or screen.



Droid Naskh was designed by 29ArabicLetters in collaboration with Ascendercorp and Google to ensure that all the requirements for a screen and web font are met. Google performed several surveys and tests on the fonts during the design and development process.


Sketches in primary design stages.

The Arabic letters were designed by Pascal Zoghbi while the Latin Letters were designed by Steve Matteson from AscenderCorp.


Droid Naskh covers all the basic and extended Arabic glyphs set to cover all the languages that use the Arabic script like Persian, Urdu, Pashto and others.

Droid Kufi was initially design by Steve Matteson and i was to consult on the design and create the final version of the font. Below is one of the sketches made to the Kufi glyphs to improve the letterforms.

Other mock-ups of Android phones sing Droid Arabic Naskh: