Designing Arabic-First Interfaces
RTL is not a mirror of LTR. Treating Arabic as a first-class language — not a translation pass — changes how we build every layout.
A surprising number of “bilingual” products are really English products wearing Arabic for an afternoon. The text gets translated, a global `dir="rtl"` is flipped on, and everyone moves on. Then the numerals run the wrong way, the icons point at nothing, and the typography feels borrowed. Designing Arabic-first means starting from the reading experience an Arabic speaker actually expects, then making English fit alongside it.
Logical, never physical
The single highest-leverage habit is to stop thinking in left and right. We build with logical properties — start and end, inline and block — so a layout authored once is correct in both directions. When margins, padding, and alignment are expressed logically, switching language stops being a QA marathon and becomes a property of the system.
- Spacing and alignment use logical axes, so RTL is correct by construction.
- Numerals, dates, and currency follow the locale, not the layout.
- Directional icons (arrows, chevrons) flip; brand and product marks do not.
- Mixed-direction strings — an Arabic sentence with a Latin product name — are isolated so neither corrupts the other.
Typography carries the tone
Arabic type has its own rhythm: longer ascenders and descenders, different optimal line-height, letterforms that connect. A type scale tuned for Latin will read cramped or loose in Arabic. So we tune the Arabic face separately — its line-height, tracking, and weight — until the two languages feel like siblings, not a parent and a guest. The goal is that an Arabic reader never senses they are on the secondary version of anything.
If the Arabic feels translated, the design failed before a single word was read.
Test in the harder language first
Our rule of thumb is to review new screens in Arabic before English. If a layout survives RTL — the trickier direction for most of our tooling — the LTR version is almost always already correct. Reversing the usual order quietly raises the floor for everyone, and it keeps Arabic from being the language we discover problems in last.