Harmattan
Type with Purpose
Good typography guides attention, improves understanding, and makes communication effortless.
The Anatomy of a Typeface
By FontSide · June 2026
Every typeface is a system of decisions — about stroke contrast, x-height, spacing, and rhythm. The best ones feel invisible: you stop seeing the letters and start hearing the voice behind them. That transparency is the hardest thing to design.
A high x-height opens up the counters and makes small text breathe. Tight tracking pulls a headline together; loose tracking gives a caption room to exhale. None of these choices are accidents — they are arguments about how reading should feel.
Uppercase
Lowercase
Numerals
Symbols
Configuration
Select the weights and styles you want to include in your project.
Weights
Package Manager
The recommended way to use fonts in modern web projects.
1. Install Package
pnpm add @fontsource/harmattan 2. Import in App
// Please select at least one weight and style 3. CSS Usage
body {
font-family: "Harmattan", sans-serif;
} Google Fonts CDN
Use Google's CDN to embed the fonts directly via HTML.
HTML <head>
<!-- Please select at least one weight and style --> Fontsource CDN
Skip the build step by adding this directly to your global CSS file.
Global CSS
/* Please select at least one weight and style */ Background & Story
Harmattan, named after the trade winds that blow during the winter in West Africa, is designed in a Warsh style to suit the needs of languages using the Arabic script in West Africa.
This font provides a simplified rendering of Arabic script, using basic connecting glyphs but not including a wide variety of additional ligatures or contextual alternates (only the required lam-alef ligatures.)
Harmattan Version 2.000 (released in June 2020) now includes a Bold style and contains near complete coverage of all the characters defined in Unicode 13.0 for Arabic script (excluding the Arabic Presentation Forms blocks, which are not recommended for normal use). It has full support for the Arabic and Arabic Supplement Unicode blocks, and the Arabic Extended-A block with the exception of U+08D3..U+08E2.
In 2023 an additional two weights for this typeface family were added for a total of four weights now. The glyphset was expanded to support all of the Unicode 15.0 character set. Support for the Kyrgyz language was added.
Bob Hallissy does Graphite, OpenType, and TypeTuner code, and build support. Becca Hirsbrunner is the Lead Designer. George W. Nuss is the Original Designer. Iska Routamaa is a Contributing Designer. The Harmattan project is maintained by SIL International. Harmattan is released under the SIL Open Font License. Harmattan is a trademark of SIL International.
For further information about this font, including Unicode ranges supported, Graphite and OpenType font features and how to use them, and licensing, please see the documentation on the website software.sil.org/Harmattan. To contribute, see github.com/silnrsi/font-harmattan.
Tags & Moods
Subsets
Install
pnpm add @fontsource/harmattan Designed by
SIL International
Links
License
OFL-1.1