Arabic signage however is more than just Arabic writing on a sign. Recognising the Middle East as a region full of diversity, controversy and cultural clashes, looking at Arabic signage comes with nuances of cultural identity: of the Arabic script, language and culture.

Essentially a sign is a marker in space and can be quite simple, or incidental. As such, a sign is writing (language), or drawing (pictures) in confined space. Yet, signs are carriers of information. As within all information exchange, the messages need not only be sent (read), but also be received – understood (Saussure). And so, the meanings of the messages on signs are most crucial to the communication. Think of the many demonstrators in many Middle Eastern countries, where citizens held up hand written, drawn or painted signs.

Still there is the difference between the calligraphic shop sign painted on a storefront, or the hand-written messages from town centre squares to call for rights and freedom, and a signage system, that is manufactured to accompany the built environment. All are signs, and all are carriers of meaning, but the production, the placement (context) and the visuals of these signs differ vastly in their meanings and intentions.

Middle East, North Africa and neighbouring regions.

The first that comes to mind when thinking of Arabic in a context of signage is the use of the various Arabic scripts in the urban landscape, the life-blood of the colorful Middle-Eastern streets. The Arabic script is more diverse than any other writing system and it works well in the urban environment, where it is found everywhere: from the over-dimensional billboard, to inscriptions in architecture, especially in Mosques, to the shopkeepers’ realm and in traffic. The very miscellaneous shapes and multiple calligraphic styles allow for manifold designs. Each calligraphic style follows strict rules of proportion and orthography. But the overwhelming beauty of the script emerges when the various styles intermingle together into rhythmic patterns to decorate space.

In the built environment of Middle Eastern urban life, signage has had many shapes. Built in architecture and décor, signs have demonstrated power, property and ranks. It is not only the tourism in the region, say for example in Sinai or Tunisia, and Morocco, that has increased a need for signage, but rather, the increase of western interest in power and/or religious pilgrims. The Middle East, due to religious territory and resources, has always been a landscape of global political magnitude. The decades of colonization, and the then so-called cultural imperialism introduced sign-making that superseded the previously sufficient hand-painted, calligraphic sign painting.

Today, manufactured signs come with a purpose to identify, inform, direct, or instruct. For wayfinding purposes the signage system is usually planned to include a range of products of modular sizes and layouts. In the context of international travel and tourism, there is nowadays an English translation accompanied by the Arabic text.

With a new approach to open cities, to inform and interact, the built environment offers the opportunity for place-making and shaping of public space. And signage supports functions, facilities and purpose with a targeted information system shaping the look and feel. The regional signfaces today accommodate images, such as pictograms, and messages written in English and Arabic in a confined layout. Metaphorically speaking, Arabic signage and wayfinding are increasingly a regional search for direction and common values.

4 letter shape forms: initial, medial, final and isolated. 2 letter shapes simplification.

The Arabic script has been through centuries of traditions and writing reforms. With the introduction of print technology, the script experienced some serious impact on its diversity. The simplification of Arabic’s writing system was to comply with the very crude layout techniques of metal type, which introduced a reduction to a 2-form shape, rather than a 4-forms variation on the connecting letterforms. Modern typography for sign design is using increasingly very angular shapes and extending/stretching the once economically staggering script to a rigid length of the full expression of the terminology. This sometimes breaks the grid of fixed layouts. The bidirectional reading directions of the Arabic script – right to left in text, and left to right in numbers – is an exceptional challenge to information hierarchy to any grid. Similarly challenging are the applications for standards: where in the west we face regional standards, such as BS, ISO, or ADA, the Middle East has not developed these sets of guidelines for its own languages and pictorial nuances. But would the standardization of culturally appropriate pictograms maintain and allow for the cultural diversity that prevails in the region?

As the region of the Middle East transitions into new political systems, the global technological trend to personalization of information introduces new tools, such as wayfinding apps, in the realm of signage. Suddenly the world of wayfinding becomes interactive with a whole new dimension. The meaning of spatial cognition surpasses the traditional three-dimensional space with the self as reference point. Questions of rules, standards and guidelines arise together with the new defining directions of national and regional values. New materials and interaction will be used in new modular systems. Here, we will see layers of meanings in messages, pictograms and script use.