Choosing a Design Studio in Riyadh: Budgets, Arabic Type, and Timelines

A Riyadh studio will quote roughly SAR 20,000–200,000 for a brand identity, SAR 25,000–180,000 for a website, and SAR 15,000–150,000 for a campaign. Choose on three things: who draws the Arabic type in-house, whether the team has delivered inside an 8–16 week window for a PIF-linked client, and whether they will name the two or three people who will actually sit on your project rather than the twelve on the credentials deck.

Those bands are wider than Dubai's for the same scope, and they are wider for a reason. Riyadh has more briefs than it has senior bilingual creative directors, so the scarce resource is not design talent in general — it is a team that can art-direct in Arabic, present in Arabic to a committee, and still hit a launch date set by a Riyadh Season calendar nobody can move.

What follows is the pricing, the Arabic standard, the studio-type trade-offs, and the questions that separate a studio that will deliver from one that will subcontract your Arabic and hope.

Why a Riyadh brief now costs more than the same brief in Dubai

Take a bilingual identity system: wordmark, typeface pairing, colour, a brand book, a Figma library. A competent Dubai studio quotes that around AED 90,000. The same scope in Riyadh lands closer to SAR 110,000–130,000 — call it a 20–35% premium on a like-for-like brief. That is a practitioner read of quotes crossing my desk, not a published index, but the direction has held since roughly 2023 and clients moving budget between the two markets see it immediately.

The cause is demand, not inflation. PIF portfolio companies and the Vision 2030 programme put four sectors into rebranding at once: hospitality and tourism (Diriyah, Red Sea Global, the Saudi Tourism Authority), entertainment (Riyadh Season and the General Entertainment Authority's calendar), sport (Saudi Pro League clubs, the AFC Asian Cup in 2027, the 2034 World Cup), and real estate and aviation (Roshn, Qiddiya, New Murabba, Riyadh Air). Expo 2030 Riyadh sits on top of all of it, with a fixed date that no procurement delay can push.

Supply has not kept pace. A single Riyadh Season activation can occupy a twelve-person studio for a full quarter, which means the studio that charmed you in January may be capacity-locked by September. Ask what a studio has already booked for the quarter your project runs in. A portfolio tells you what a team can do; a capacity answer tells you whether they will do it for you.

SAR pricing bands, and what actually sits at each end

Brand identity, SAR 20,000–200,000. At SAR 20,000–45,000 you get a wordmark, a colour set, a licensed typeface pairing and a 15–20 page guideline PDF, usually from a three-to-five person studio or a strong freelance art director. At SAR 60,000–120,000 you get a full bilingual system: Arabic and Latin lockups, naming and trademark screening, a brand book, a Figma library with tokens, and basic motion. Above SAR 150,000 you are paying for customised or bespoke Arabic letterforms, tone of voice written separately in both languages, and a launch campaign key visual set.

Website, SAR 25,000–180,000. The floor is five to eight pages on a template-derived design system with genuine RTL support; SAR 70,000–120,000 buys a custom design system, CMS build and proper RTL parity QA; above SAR 150,000 you are funding Arabic-first art direction, motion, and a component library handed to your own developers. Campaigns run SAR 15,000–150,000: a single-channel static set at the bottom, a key visual plus film plus OOH adaptation at the top.

Three things sit outside the design fee and blow up budgets when nobody says so early: 15% VAT, production (photography, film, retouching, media buying), and typeface licences. Payment is usually 50/30/20 against milestones, and out-of-scope work is billed at roughly SAR 300–900 per hour depending on seniority. For reference on the same scope elsewhere in the Gulf, Dubai runs about AED 18,000–150,000 and Doha about QAR 15,000–120,000.

The Arabic bar in Saudi is the highest in the GCC

Your audience reads Arabic first, your regulator corresponds in Arabic, and any PIF-linked or ministry-facing communication leads in Arabic. In Dubai a brand can ship a Latin-led identity with an Arabic version added for signage compliance and survive. In Riyadh that reads as an import, and it is the single fastest way for a new brand to look like it was made somewhere else.

The craft is not translation. Arabic has no capitals and no true italics, so hierarchy has to come from weight, size and space. Kashida is a typographic decision, not a justification button — auto-stretching to fill a line is the most common tell of a studio out of its depth. Line height usually needs 20–30% more than the Latin setting, numerals must be chosen deliberately (١٢٣ or 123) and then kept consistent across every touchpoint, and a bilingual lockup fails the moment the Arabic is scaled to match Latin cap-height instead of being drawn to sit correctly beside it.

Ask which foundry the Arabic comes from and you learn a lot in one answer. 29LT (Zarid, Bukra, Okaso), TPTQ Arabic (Greta Arabic), Boutros and the Khatt Foundry are the names a working Riyadh studio uses. Licences are a real line item — typically a few hundred euros per weight for desktop use, plus tiered web licences by pageview — so establish before signing who buys them, in whose name they sit, and whether they transfer to you at handover.

A 20-minute test for Arabic typography capability

Send the studio one sentence of your own Arabic copy and ask for it set twice in the typeface they propose: once at 12pt and once at 120pt. At 120pt you can see whether the letterforms are drawn or stretched, whether diacritics sit correctly, and whether the kashida is deliberate. At 12pt you can see whether it is actually readable on a phone. Then ask for the bilingual lockup with your Latin name beside it. If the Arabic looks visually smaller than the English, they have matched cap-height instead of optical weight, and the identity will read as a translation everywhere it appears.

Follow with four questions. Which foundry and which licence tier? Who on the team is a native Arabic reader, and do they sign off the final proof? Can I see an Arabic wordmark you drew rather than typed in a retail font, plus the source file? And who proofs Arabic copy before it goes to print? A studio that routes Arabic to an outside translator with no native reader on the final proof will eventually put a mistake on a six-metre board on King Fahd Road, and reprinting that costs more than the whole identity.

Local, Dubai-based, or international: the real trade-offs

A Riyadh studio holds a Saudi commercial registration, invoices through ZATCA e-invoicing (Fatoora), and can be paid by a government or PIF-linked entity without a cross-border deduction. It also shows up in person for weekly reviews, which matters when your approval chain includes a committee that prefers to be walked through work rather than sent a PDF. The trade-off is bench depth: a small local studio running three giga-project briefs at once will staff yours with whoever is free.

A Dubai studio usually brings a deeper bench and more category experience, and pays for it in friction: flights, hotel nights, and withholding tax on fees paid to a non-resident — broadly 5% on technical and consulting services, and 15% if the tax authority treats a deliverable as a royalty. Get your tax adviser to confirm the treatment of your specific scope before you sign, because it changes the effective price. Expect the fourth workshop to happen on a video call, which is where alignment usually slips.

An international studio in London, New York or Amsterdam is worth it for a category-defining identity where the work has to hold up globally, at roughly EUR 150,000–600,000 for equivalent scope. The question to press on is who does the Arabic. Most subcontract it. Ask for the name of the Arabic partner and review that partner exactly as you would a lead studio, because they are drawing half your brand.

Timelines run 8–16 weeks, and what to ask on the first call

Plan on 10–14 weeks for a brand identity, 8–12 for a website through design and build, and 4–6 for a campaign. Ramadan and the Riyadh Season calendar compress everything around them: a Q4 Riyadh Season deliverable that has not started by August is already late, and the design work is rarely the constraint. Client-side approvals are. Two rounds of committee feedback with a week of silence between them will cost you more calendar than the entire design phase.

Seven questions for the first call, in this order. Who exactly is on my team and what share of their week do I get? How many revision rounds are included, and what is the hourly rate beyond that? Who draws and proofs the Arabic, and are they staff or subcontracted? Who owns the source files and the typeface licences at handover? What is the payment schedule in SAR, and is VAT quoted separately? What does handover actually contain — a Figma library with tokens, or flat PDFs? And give me one reference whose project went badly, so I can hear how you handled it. The last question is the one that tells you the most.