Arabic-First Menu Design: Principles That Work

Most "bilingual" restaurant menus in the Gulf are actually English menus with Arabic added as an afterthought. The English layout comes first, Arabic text is squeezed into whatever space remains, and the result reads awkwardly in both languages. This approach doesn't just look bad — it can violate regulations in every GCC country that mandates Arabic as the primary language. Arabic-first menu design starts with Arabic as the primary layout direction and builds English support on top. ## Principle 1: RTL as Default Arabic reads right-to-left (RTL). A menu designed Arabic-first means: - Category headers start from the right - Item names and descriptions flow from right to left - Prices appear on the left (the natural endpoint of an RTL reading line) - The entire page grid mirrors what English readers expect, but in reverse When English is needed, the same grid works in LTR — the key is designing the grid to be direction-agnostic. ## Principle 2: Typography That Respects Both Scripts Arabic and Latin scripts have fundamentally different typographic characteristics: - Arabic connects letters; Latin separates them - Arabic has no uppercase/lowercase distinction - Arabic line height tends to be taller due to diacritical marks - Arabic feels visually heavier at the same point size The solution is to pair fonts that have similar visual weight. Qaima uses a system that adjusts sizes and spacing per locale so that Arabic and English text feel balanced. ## Principle 3: No Machine Translation Google Translate produces Arabic that any native speaker instantly recognizes as unnatural. Menu Arabic requires: - Correct culinary terminology (not literal translations) - Regional dialect awareness (Egyptian Arabic menu terms differ from Gulf Arabic) - Proper use of food-specific vocabulary ## Principle 4: Bilingual Doesn't Mean Duplicated A well-designed bilingual menu doesn't show the same content twice. Instead: - The primary language (Arabic) gets full descriptions - The secondary language (English) gets concise translations - Shared elements like prices and calorie counts appear once This approach reduces visual clutter and makes the menu faster to scan in both languages.