New release: Sakkal Saad
- Date
- July 2025
We are thrilled to announce the release of Sakkal Saad, a comprehensive Arabic typeface family from Dr. Mamoun Sakkal and Aida Sakkal that has already been distinguished with a TDC 2023 Certificate of Typographic Excellence and a GRANSHAN 2023-24 Special Mention. This friendly, handwritten Naskh design masterfully bridges time, channelling the vibrant, optimistic energy of Middle Eastern print media from the 1960s to the 1980s while delivering a thoroughly contemporary toolset for today’s designers.
Comprising two harmonised families—Sakkal Saad and the more commanding Sakkal Saad Poster—the system offers 12 weights packed with over 3,000 glyphs each. It is a feature-rich powerhouse, granting unparalleled control over text justification, swash lengths, and letterforms through its extensive OpenType features, making it as suited for poetic, long-form text as it is for bold, eye-catching posters and branding.
Sakkal Saad brings versatile, feature-rich style to expressive graphic design.
We are excited to announce the release of Sakkal Saad, an Arabic typeface with 12 styles by Dr. Mamoun Sakkal and Aida Sakkal! The family communicates through both traditional and modern design elements: calligraphic beauty balanced by sharp pen strokes for a contemporary look that carries a dose of warmth.
Designed for text, Sakkal Saad has compact vertical proportions for space economy while maintaining legibility, whereas Sakkal Saad Poster opts to take up more vertical space with a commanding presence that still only barely extends words horizontally across a line. The sharp strokes of the pen are also clearly expressed for a contemporary look, highlighting the fine characteristics of Naskh calligraphy here.
The text family, Sakkal Saad, is ideal for signage, branding, and long text settings, especially online and in books and magazines. And the display family, Sakkal Saad Poster is great for display and advertising. With an included custom version of Aneto for Latin-based text, Sakkal Saad provides clarity and graphic style in multiscript design and communication.
The family is ideal for signage, branding, poetry, and long text settings, especially online and in books and magazines.
The shared, rich OpenType features across all 12 weights create a seamless and powerful design system for complex projects.
Dr Mamoun Sakkal is founder and principal of Sakkal Design in Bothell, Washington. After a career as an artist and architect, his firm has focused on Arabic calligraphy and typography since the 1990s. Clients include National Geographic, Microsoft, Linotype, and Adobe, among others. Sakkal Design was commissioned to design the corporate Arabic typefaces for Dubai’s Burj Khalifa and Armani Hotel, and several of his Arabic fonts are now widely used as Microsoft Windows system fonts. He has received several awards for calligraphy, graphics, and type design, including four awards of excellence from the Type Directors Club of New York and one from IRCICA in Istanbul.
Aida Sakkal specialises in developing and programming font systems to model the artistic tendencies of beautifully handwritten calligraphy. She has worked extensively with OpenType since 2001 and has been involved in the growth and advancement of OpenType and its application to Arabic fonts. With a degree in computer science from the University of Washington, her other focus is on developing tools to aid and automate the font creation process.
Aida works with his father, Dr. Mamoun Sakkal, as Sakkal Design, a father–daughter studio in Bothell, Washington focused on Arabic calligraphy and typography since the 1990s. Their clients include Adobe, Amazon, Apple Inc., Linotype, Microsoft, and Monotype, among others; they were also commissioned to design the corporate Arabic typefaces for Dubai’s Burj Khalifa and Armani Hotel. The firm has been the Arabic language expert for Microsoft for more than 20 years, and several of their Arabic fonts are now widely used as Microsoft Windows system fonts. Their original fonts have won multiple awards, including six awards of excellence from the Type Directors Club of New York, six awards from Granshan competition, and others.
