The most common failure in motion design in this region is an English layout with Arabic dropped into it. It reads as an afterthought because it is one. Everyone can see it. Almost nobody says it out loud, because the person who commissioned it usually can't articulate what's wrong — only that it looks cheap next to the English version.
Most of my broadcast output at Almashhad is Arabic-language, so these are daily problems rather than occasional ones. Here is what actually goes wrong, in the order it goes wrong.
1. Arabic is a connected script
Latin letters are discrete objects. You can stagger them, offset them, animate them in one at a time, and the word survives. Arabic letters join — their shape changes depending on what sits either side of them. Animate them individually and you don't get a stylish reveal, you get a word coming apart.
This single fact invalidates most of the default After Effects text animator vocabulary. Any preset built around per-character offset is unusable, and you find that out after you've built the comp.
2. The reveal has to follow the gesture
Because the script is continuous, the reveal has to follow the writing stroke, or the whole lockup has to arrive as one form. Those are basically the two honest options. A calligraphic line has a direction and a speed built into it — the thick and thin of the stroke tells you how the pen moved. If your reveal contradicts that, it reads as machine-made even to viewers who couldn't explain why.
The Bil Tawfiq ident I designed is built around exactly this: gold lettering revealed with the stroke, glass rings and floating particles doing the decoration around the type instead of interfering with it.
3. The eye enters from the other side
Right-to-left isn't a text setting, it's a composition change. Your entry point moves. Whatever you want read first goes on the right. Motion that sweeps left-to-right — which in Latin design reads as forward, progressive, natural — reads as backward. Lower thirds have to be rebuilt, not mirrored, because mirroring flips your logo and your safe areas with it.
4. Weight and counter-space are different
At the same optical size, Arabic has different density and different negative space than Latin. A bilingual lockup that balances perfectly on paper often doesn't balance in motion, because the two scripts settle at different visual weights once they start moving. You fix this by eye, in motion, at final size. Never in a static comp.
5. Diacritics need vertical room
Tashkeel and dots occupy space above and below the baseline that your safe-area planning has to account for from the beginning. This bites hardest on lower thirds, where the box height is fixed by the package and there is nowhere to go. Plan the vertical budget before you design the box, not after.
Bilingual lockups: two solutions to one idea
The mistake is treating the Arabic as a translation of the design. It isn't. I design the Arabic version and the English version as two answers to the same idea. They share the concept, the colour and the timing structure. They do not necessarily share the composition — and they shouldn't, because the scripts don't want the same composition.
This costs more time. It is also the entire difference between work that looks native and work that looks localised.
A short checklist
- Is the Arabic set with correct shaping and joins — not just a font swap?
- Does the reveal follow the stroke, or arrive as one form?
- Does the composition read from the right?
- Did you check the bilingual weight balance in motion, at final size?
- Do the diacritics fit inside the safe area on the tightest lower third?
- Did an Arabic reader look at it before it went out?
That last one is not optional. It is also the cheapest of the six and the one most often skipped.
Why this matters commercially
Channels, agencies and brands across the UAE and the wider Gulf need work that is correct in Arabic and competitive in English. The pool of motion designers who can genuinely do both — rather than outsourcing one half and hoping — is much smaller than the number of studios advertising it.
If you work in this market and you've been treating Arabic as a localisation step, that gap is the most valuable thing you could close this year.
More on Arabic motion graphics and the work behind it →
Questions people ask
Why do Arabic motion graphics often look wrong?
Usually because an English layout was designed first and Arabic was dropped in afterwards. Arabic is a connected script whose letterforms change shape depending on their neighbours, the eye enters the composition from the right, and diacritics need vertical space. A design that ignores those things reads as localised rather than native.
Can you animate Arabic text letter by letter?
Not in the way you can with Latin type. Arabic letters join, and their shapes depend on adjacent letters, so per-character animation pulls the word apart. Reveals should follow the writing stroke, or the whole lockup should arrive as one form.
How should a bilingual Arabic and English lockup be designed?
As two solutions to one idea rather than one design translated. They share the concept, colour and timing structure, but not necessarily the composition — the two scripts have different density, counter-space and reading direction, so they rarely want the same layout.
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