Monotype has announced Tanseek, an eight-font family comprising both Roman and Arabic alphabets. The fonts are available in a a variety of weights and in both serif and sans serif styles.

The font family, which Monotype claims is the first of its kind, aims to provide a balanced, harmonious solution to bilingual signage, text and other bilingual typography problems, which are becoming increasingly frequent with the explosive development of the Middle East. Its name means 'harmony' in Arabic.

Mourad Boutros, head of the London-based Boutros International, and his wife Arlette, designed the Arabic fonts. He says: "We paid careful attention to ensure consistency within various typographic aspects, from line weights and curves to the distance between the baseline of characters and their meanline, or x-height. We wanted to make sure any two Tanseek fonts would work well together, no matter how they were used or in what combination."

"Tanseek was designed with a calculated eye toward balancing character shape, stroke, width and text color between the two alphabets," said Dave Farey, who heads HouseStyle Graphics in London. He and his typeface design partner, Richard Dawson, created the Latin portion of the Tanseek typeface. "While the Arabic design provides calligraphic elegance, the Latin counterparts lend aesthetic compatibility and exceptional legibility."

The Tanseek Pro Complete Family Pack combines an Arabic traditional design with a Latin-based serif counterpart in the OpenType® Pro font format in regular, light, bold and extra bold weights. The family pack also contains an Arabic modern design paired with a Latin-based sans serif design available in the same font format and weights. Individual combinations may be licensed separately.

Tanseek fonts are being used in various industries and world markets, including television channels in Saudi Arabia, university communications in the U.S. and Qatar and a retail clothing outlet in Sweden. The design is also being employed as a corporate typeface for a luxury resort in the Kingdom of Bahrain and as part of a logo for a property developer in Dubai. "While Tanseek combines superior Arabic and Latin type into a single solution, it's really much more than that," said Haley. "It's a typographic system for serving the needs of a multicultural environment, which sounds a lot like our world in the 21st century."

To view Tanseek click here.