On the studio

The scriptorium at Third Circle

Noon started as someone else's promise. PixelDima, a WordPress theme studio with roots in the MENA region, built the original Noon block theme in 2023 and announced an AI feature called DimaBlocks AI. The link went live in the navigation bar. The page returned a 404.

Rania Al-Qudah, then an Automattic engineer working on the Gutenberg full-site editing team, bought the domain when it expired and called Leo Grasset. They had met at a typography conference in Beirut the previous year. Leo was wrapping up three years at Penguin Random House, where he had spent most of his time thinking about how type systems survive digital publishing. Neither of them was looking to start a company.

The question that started the whole thing was specific: could you build an AI layer that stays genuinely inside WordPress? Not a chatbot that produces HTML you paste in. Not a page builder that replaces the block editor. Something that reads your active theme.json, understands your current Global Styles, and writes real block code.

It took eight months of prototypes before the answer was yes.

On type, and why it matters here

WordPress runs a large share of the web. Most of it looks identical. Not because options are scarce, but because customizing a theme properly takes longer than starting over, and nothing in the standard toolchain helps you close that gap.

Noura Khoury joined the studio six months after it opened. She had spent four years at a type foundry in Beirut learning how Arabic and Latin scripts interact on a shared page, and she had opinions about what the WordPress type system should do that nobody had built yet.

Type Rubric and RTL Concordance exist because of those opinions. They weren't planned as features. They were the things that needed to exist before the studio could do its own work properly. Yasmin, our first paying user, had the same list.

We're in Amman. We write in Arabic every day. RTL isn't a checkbox we ticked before shipping. It's the context the whole thing was built in.