Designing with type, building with AI.
01 — Book & cover design
Covers and series systems for publishers and authors, built in InDesign and Illustrator, with scripts doing the repetitive work.
02 — Typesetting
Five sample chapters from books I typeset in InDesign, in English and Arabic. Drag a page to turn it, move over the text to magnify it, or switch on the baselines to see the grid, measured from the print PDFs.
03 — AI projects
Tools I designed and built end to end, from data pipeline to interface and deploy. Hifdh.uk and Deckhand are live on the web; the rest are Mac and desktop apps I use every day.
The tool that drew the covers.
For the Forty Hadith series I needed calligraphy I could reshape for every volume. So I built Mistara: real Arabic shaping (HarfBuzz compiled to WebAssembly) that turns letters into editable vector outlines.
Each volume is now a data file. Shape the word, export the SVG, and a script places it as native CMYK paths in InDesign, cropped to the trim with the first letter kept intact.
04 — Websites
Sites I designed, wrote and built, live on their own domains. Two are bilingual, with Arabic set right to left as its own layout, not a mirror.
-
A daily wird, a hifdh plan with a finish date, the full mushaf and a makharij trainer, with sign-in and sync across devices.
Design · build · data
-
A book design studio for publishers and authors. A wall of real covers, the process from manuscript to print, and booking, in English and Arabic.
Design · copy · bilingual build
-
A branding studio: identity, campaigns, social, print and book design. A fluid colour hero in the brand palette, in English and Arabic.
Design · copy · bilingual build
I design and typeset books for publishers and authors, mostly Islamic titles in English and Arabic: covers, series systems and full interiors, from manuscript to print-ready PDF and ebook. Alongside that I build software, usually the tools I needed for my own work and study.
- 01
Read
The manuscript first, then the brief: who reads it, where it sells, and how it should feel in the hand.
- 02
Design
Two or three cover routes and sample spreads, so the decisions are made on real pages.
- 03
Set
Styles, grids and parent pages in InDesign, with Arabic on the World-Ready composer and scripts for the repetitive work.
- 04
Proof
Rounds of corrections, then a preflight: fonts, bleed, images, and no runts or widows.
- 05
Deliver
Print PDF, cover wrap with spine, ebook PDF and EPUB, and the packaged InDesign files.
Design
- Book & cover design
- English & Arabic typesetting
- Series systems
- Arabic & Latin typography
- Brand identity
AI
- Speech recognition (Whisper)
- LLM pipelines & agents
- Spaced repetition
- On-device ML (MLX)
Build
- JavaScript, Python, Swift
- WebGL & WebAssembly
- Cloudflare, Modal
- InDesign & Illustrator scripting
Languages
- English
- Arabic (classical)
Selected work forKube PublishingJaryah BooksJaryah StudiosIndependent authors