arabify.iocalligraphy studio

Calligraphy generator

مولد الخط العربي

Guide

How to design Arabic calligraphy that holds up

The studio gives you thirteen authentic hands and full control over colour, spacing and export. Knowing which hand suits which job — and where Arabic type behaves unlike Latin type — is what separates a clean export from a cramped one.

Choosing a hand

Arabic calligraphy is not one style with thirteen skins. Each family evolved for a different job, and using the wrong one is the most common reason a design feels off even when the colours are right. Compare them on the same phrase:

Naskh — for anything meant to be read

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Amiri أميري

The safest default. Generous counters, well-drawn diacritics, and it stays legible from small sizes up to poster scale. Start here for Qur’anic text.

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Scheherazade شهرزاد

Slightly heavier than Amiri with a wider aperture. Its harakat sit high and clear, so it handles densely vocalised passages better than almost anything else here.

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Lateef لطيف

Lighter and more compact. Good when you have several lines to fit and Amiri starts to feel bulky, but it thins out at small sizes.

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Markazi مركزي

A modern take on Naskh with a slight editorial contrast. Reads well as a subheading or a pull quote sitting under a heavier display line.

Naskh is the script of books and of the printed Qur’an. If your text is a full sentence, a verse, or anything a reader will actually parse word by word, this family is the right answer. It is also the only family here where you can push the line count past three without the design collapsing.

Kufic — for logos, architecture and bold statements

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Reem Kufi ريم كوفي

Angular, geometric, and squared off to a strong horizontal baseline. Set it large, tight and short — two or three words at most.

Kufic is the oldest form of Arabic calligraphy, and its logic is architectural rather than cursive. It rewards short text and punishes long text: a five-word phrase in Reem Kufi reads as a wall, not as a sentence. Because the strokes are near-uniform in weight, Kufic also survives being reproduced very small — which is exactly why it dominates in Arabic brand marks, and why our Kufic guide treats it as a logo script first.

Diwani — for invitations, ornament and movement

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Aref Ruqaa عارف رقعة

Ottoman chancery character with strong stroke contrast and a lively baseline. Elegant at large sizes, muddy at small ones.

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Rakkas ركّاس

A heavy display Diwani. Almost no room above the letters, so avoid it for vocalised text — set it clean, without harakat.

Nastaliq — for Persian, Urdu and South Asian work

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Gulzar گلزار

The hanging script: each word cascades down and to the left. Needs far more line height than any other hand — 1.8 or above, or lines will overlap.

Nastaliq is the one hand in the studio with a genuinely different geometry. Words descend diagonally instead of sitting on a flat baseline, so the vertical space a line occupies is roughly double what a Naskh line needs. If you set Nastaliq at the default line height and the second line clips into the first, that is the cause.

Modern — for branding and interface work

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Cairo القاهرة

A clean contemporary sans. Neutral, highly legible, and the most Latin-compatible hand here if your design mixes scripts.

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Tajawal تجوّل

Slightly warmer and rounder than Cairo. Good for friendly consumer brands and app screenshots.

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El Messiri المسيري

Carries a trace of calligraphic contrast while staying modern. A useful middle ground when Naskh feels too traditional and Cairo too plain.

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Lalezar لاله‌زار

Heavy, poster-weight display. Made for headlines and price tags, not for paragraphs or diacritics.

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Marhey مرحى

Playful and rounded, with an informal bounce. Suits youth brands, stickers and casual social posts.

Working with harakat

Harakat — the fatha, kasra, damma, shadda and sukun marks that vocalise Arabic — are where most generators fall apart, because they are rendered as separate marks positioned relative to each letter. Three practical rules:

  • Size before spacing. If the marks collide, raise the font size first. Diacritics occupy a fixed proportion of the glyph, so scaling up buys clearance that letter spacing cannot.
  • Line height carries the marks, not the letters. Vocalised Arabic wants roughly 1.6–1.8 where plain Arabic is happy at 1.3. The extra room is for the marks above the ascenders and the kasra sitting below the baseline.
  • Letter spacing is a last resort. Arabic is cursive: increasing the spacing pulls apart strokes that are meant to connect. Use it for a deliberately disconnected Kufic effect, not to fix a crowded line.

If you are unsure whether your source text is fully vocalised, our guide to harakat and tashkeel covers what each mark does and when leaving them off is the better typographic choice.

Sizing for where the image will land

The six presets are not arbitrary crops — each matches a real placement, and picking the right one before you set the type saves re-fitting later:

  • Square, 1080×1080 — the Instagram feed post. The most forgiving canvas: centred text with generous margins works almost every time.
  • Story, 1080×1920 — Reels, Stories and TikTok. Keep the calligraphy inside the middle third; the top and bottom are covered by interface chrome in most apps.
  • Landscape, 1920×1080 — YouTube thumbnails, slides and desktop wallpaper. Suits one short line at a large size rather than stacked lines.
  • Wide, 1500×500 — profile banners and site headers. The tightest vertical space here, so this is a Kufic or Modern canvas, not a Nastaliq one.
  • Social, 1200×630 — the Open Graph and X card ratio, used when a link is shared. Set the type large; platforms downscale this card aggressively in the feed.
  • Portrait, 1000×1500 — Pinterest and printable wall art. The best preset for multi-line Qur’anic verses and for anything you intend to print.

Colour, ground and shadow

The ink can be a solid colour or a gradient, and the ground can be solid, gradient or fully transparent. A few things worth knowing:

  • Gradient ink needs weight behind it. A gradient across a thin Lateef stroke reads as a muddy colour shift. Gradients belong on heavy hands — Rakkas, Lalezar, Reem Kufi — where there is enough stroke area to see the transition.
  • Transparent grounds only survive as PNG. Exporting a transparent design as JPG silently fills the background. If you are placing the calligraphy over a photo or a product mockup, PNG is the only correct choice.
  • Shadow is for separation, not decoration. A soft shadow at low opacity lifts light ink off a mid-tone ground. A hard, heavy shadow on already high-contrast text just thickens the strokes and closes the counters.
  • Check contrast if the image carries meaning. Gold on cream looks luxurious on a large screen and disappears on a phone in daylight. If the phrase matters, keep real luminance difference between ink and ground.

Where people take it from here

The same rendering engine drives the other two studios. If your goal is a brand mark rather than a poster, the logo maker adds symbols, slogans and balanced lockups at export sizes up to 2048px. If you want the phrase to animate — writing on right-to-left, fading or rising into place — the video studio exports WebM and GIF from the same canvas. For phrase ideas, the collection of Islamic phrases gives you correctly vocalised Arabic with transliterations and meanings.

Frequently asked questions

Why do my harakat look cramped or collide with the letters?

Either the size is too small or the hand is too tight. Diacritics sit in the space above and below the baseline, and that space does not scale as fast as the letters do. Raise the font size, push line height to 1.6 or higher, and prefer a Naskh hand such as Amiri or Scheherazade — they were designed around fully vocalised text. Display faces like Rakkas and Lalezar were not.

Can I type Arabic if I don't have an Arabic keyboard?

Yes. Paste the text from anywhere — a Qur'an site, a document, a message — and it renders exactly the same, diacritics included. The ready-made phrase buttons also drop correctly vocalised Arabic straight onto the canvas with one tap, which is the fastest route for Bismillah, MashaAllah, Eid Mubarak and similar phrases.

Which export format should I choose?

PNG if the background is transparent, or if the design has flat colour and hard edges — it is lossless and it keeps the alpha channel, so the calligraphy drops onto any surface. JPG only when the background is a photo-like gradient and you need a smaller file. JPG has no transparency at all: exporting a transparent design as JPG fills the ground with a solid colour.

Is the exported image high enough resolution for print?

For most uses, yes. The canvas exports at its full pixel dimensions — the Portrait preset is 1000×1500 and Landscape is 1920×1080, which print cleanly at postcard and A5 sizes. For a large wall print, choose the largest preset and keep the font size high rather than scaling the file up afterwards, since raster output cannot be enlarged without softening.

Does my text get uploaded anywhere?

No. Every glyph is rendered by your own browser on an HTML5 canvas, and the download is produced locally from that canvas. Nothing you type is sent to a server, which is why the studio works with personal names, private messages and unreleased brand names without any account.

Why does the same phrase look wider in one font than another?

Arabic hands differ enormously in how far they extend a connected stroke. Nastaliq slopes down and to the left, so it needs vertical room; Diwani stretches horizontally and adds flourishes; Kufic sets nearly square. If a phrase overflows after a font change, reduce the size or switch to a wider preset rather than squeezing the letter spacing, which breaks the connections between letters.