Guide

How to write your name in Square Kufic

You don't need to read Arabic to start, but you do need your name in Arabic letters. This guide goes from spelling your name to exporting a finished piece.

By Zaid Ahmed · 26 October 2026

1. Spell your name in Arabic letters

   Square Kufic writes Arabic letters, so start with your name in Arabic. If it's an Arabic name you may already know the spelling, like زيد for Zaid. If not, ask someone who reads Arabic, because many names can be spelled more than one way.

2. Know which letters join

   Arabic is written from right to left, and most letters join the letter after them.¹ Six letters, ا د ذ ر ز و, never join the letter that follows.¹ Your Square Kufic needs to join in the same places.²

3. Pick a square size

   Start small. A 9 × 9 or 11 × 11 grid is plenty for a short name written once. Repeating it four times needs more room. Odd sizes keep you starting and ending on a stroke. The rules guide explains why.

4. Draw the letters from right to left

   Open Square Kufic App in Beginner mode and draw your first letter on the right, along a baseline. Keep every letter the same height. Narrow letters can be stretched to fill space,² but don't bend a letter so far that it loses its usual shape.³

5. Fill the square

   Square Kufic fills its square completely.⁴ Any line across or down the grid can be a baseline, so a word can turn the corner and keep going.² Two simple layouts are to repeat your name along all four sides, or to spiral it in toward the centre.³

   Designs that turn a word four times around the centre suit Square Kufic's right angles.⁴ The app's Pinwheel symmetry does the turning for you: draw one quarter and it draws the other three as you go.

6. Fix the red rules

   Beginner mode checks six rules as you draw. Tap a red one to select the squares that break it, then fix them until every rule passes.

7. Check it by eye, then export

   Go through Check by eye in the Rules tab, and ask someone who reads Arabic to look it over before you print or engrave it. Then export an SVG for print and cutting, or a PNG to share.

Worked example: Muhammad and Ali

This classic design shows the steps above in a single square. The name Muhammad, محمد, is written four times, each copy turned a quarter around the centre. Read the white spaces between the strokes and they spell another name, Ali, علي.⁵ The same idea appears in the complex of Sultan Qalawun in Cairo, built in 1284.⁶

Three things to notice for your own name:

• Every stroke and every gap is the same width, so the black and the white carry equal weight.
• Each copy of the name runs along its own baseline, and the four baselines turn around the square. Pinwheel symmetry in the app makes this kind of layout.
• Nothing is left over. The letters stretch until the square is full, without any filler.

Sources

1. Arabic alphabet, Wikipedia.
2. Joumana Medlej, Creative Arabic Calligraphy: Square Kufic, Envato Tuts+.
3. Mamoun Sakkal, Square Kufi instruction, sakkal.com.
4. Mamoun Sakkal, Square Kufic Calligraphy in Identity Design, Identity no. 8, 2006.
5. File:Kufic Muhammad.svg, Wikimedia Commons.
6. Mamoun Sakkal, Mysteries of Square Kufi Calligraphy, Future Vision, 2003.

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