One of the greatest things about consulting is that you never know what challenge is around the corner. Recently a client approached us to refresh the look of their site and make some general structural changes. All in a day’s work, right? But this project has a big twist.

The site needed to be in Arabic. So what did that mean? Well for starters, it meant everything I designed had to read from right to left, so I had to take everything I knew about usability standards and flip it. Seems easy enough, but as a designer and a user, my internal alarm went off every time I saw that logo in the top right of the screen. Just didn’t feel right.

I also had to throw out most everything I know about typography. I found myself trying to select a font, but knowing nothing about the Arabic alphabet, I could very well choose the comic sans of the Middle East and be none the wiser.

So we started where we always do – with research. We carefully reviewed popular Arabic sites to get a sense for preferred colors and other design elements. We studied general Arabic usability guidelines. We browsed design forums for font recommendations, including sizing and line-spacing.

With a little research under my belt, I felt semi-prepared to give this design challenge a shot, so we asked the client for some sample content. They came back with some Arabic content in Word, so naturally I cut and paste it into Photoshop. I used “Baghdad “font, which was native to my MacBook Pro. Easy.

Before long, I had an initial design comp ready to present. I admit, I was feeling pretty good that I'd hit the mark. But when we unveiled the exciting new design to the client, the bubble burst. "This isn't Arabic," they said. Huh? I used the Arabic text they provided, and used a recommended Arabic font. Well, turns out Photoshop doesn't exactly work like that. Pasting the Arabic text converted it to some other language, just not sure which one - Persian perhaps?

In any case, it was wrong. At this point it was now looking like we'd have to invest a cool grand to purchase Photoshop ME (Middle Eastern) to get this to work. Fortunately, right before pulling out the charge card, we stumbled on the answer. Buried in the Adobe support forums was a little-known Arabic Photoshop template available for free download.

The Arabic Photoshop template is simply one text layer containing a few Arabic characters. But it is a magical little layer. It accepted a cut and paste of Arabic text, and allowed me to select other Arabic fonts. Better yet, I could subsequently drag this layer into my existing homepage design, and it still maintained the Arabic language. Problem solved!

The new version of the design is nearing completion, and I feel very confident that we’ll be showing the client something that at least one of us can understand. I've included links to the magical Arabic template file below, for those facing a similar challenge. And be sure we’ll be blogging when the new site launches.

Arabic Photoshop Template for Windows

Arabic Photoshop Template for Mac