Harmattan

Try Harmattan

Weights and styles

• Regular 400Harmattan Regular
• Medium 500Harmattan Medium
• SemiBold 600Harmattan SemiBold
• Bold 700Harmattan Bold

About Harmattan

Harmattan is a typeface for Arabic script, named after the dry winter wind of West Africa and shaped by the Warsh writing style used in that region. Its rendering is deliberately simple: letters connect through basic joining forms, and the only ligatures are the required lam-alef pairs, with no large set of contextual alternates. The family has four static weights, Regular, Medium, SemiBold and Bold, and no italic. Each file holds 1,788 glyphs; the project notes describe near-complete coverage of the Arabic-script characters in Unicode. The Latin part, shown in the specimen, is an open, low-contrast humanist sans limited to the basic Latin subset. SIL International maintains the project; the notes name George W. Nuss as original designer and Becca Hirsbrunner as lead designer.

Where Harmattan works

West African Ajami texts

The Warsh-style shapes and wide Arabic-script character set are aimed at languages of the region that are written with Arabic letters.

Literacy and educational material

Simplified joining with only the lam-alef ligatures presents each letter in a predictable form for learners.

Books and newsletters

Four weights from Regular to Bold allow titles, subheads and body text within one Arabic family.

Bilingual pages

The built-in Latin sans sets English or French words beside Arabic-script text at a matching weight.

Glyphs

Language support

The family contains the core letters these languages are written with:

• English
• French
• German
• Spanish
• Portuguese
• Italian
• Dutch
• Swedish
• Norwegian
• Danish
• Finnish
• Icelandic
• Catalan
• Estonian

Writing systems with glyphs in the family besides Latin: Arabic. These are listed as scripts, not as a promise for every language written in them.

Character sets found in the files: arabic, latin. The language list is a check of required letters against the font, not a promise of typographic quality in each language.

License

Fonts that pair with Harmattan

Suggestions come from simple rules on the records: a contrasting classification and enough weights to carry body text. They are a starting point, not a verdict.

Use Harmattan on the web

Download the family and host the files on your own site, then declare them in CSS. Please do not link to the files on trendhub.net: preview files here are subsets and their addresses change.

@font-face {
  font-family: "Harmattan";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Harmattan-Bold.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 700;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Harmattan";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Harmattan-Medium.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 500;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Harmattan";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Harmattan-Regular.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 400;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Harmattan";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Harmattan-SemiBold.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 600;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}

body {
  font-family: "Harmattan", sans-serif;
}

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves Harmattan with this markup:

<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.googleapis.com">
<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.gstatic.com" crossorigin>
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Harmattan:wght@400;500;600;700&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Things to know

Simplified shaping

Apart from the required lam-alef ligatures, Harmattan does not include decorative ligatures or a broad range of contextual alternates.

Static weights, no italic

The four weights are separate files. Harmattan is not a variable font.

Latin is basic

Latin coverage is limited to the basic subset for Western European languages; the Latin Extended subset is not present.

FAQs

Collections with Harmattan

• Fonts that support Arabic

  Open-license families for the Arabic script with a matching Latin: Naskh text faces, Kufi-based sans-serifs and display designs.

Similar fonts

Other families in the same classification, ordered by shared use tags. All sans serif fonts