A designer by day.

It took me a while (a pretty long one actually) to figure out how to go about this one, then I thought I'd mess around with the awesome blend tool in Illustrator and this is where it got me!

Last week, there was something on the news about a statue of Said Akl being unveiled in Zahle in his homage. It reminded me of this article I had read a couple of years ago about Said Akl's "Lebanese Language" in Bidoun Magazine.

I'm someone who loves the Arabic language and who won't go into the "Are we Arabs or Phoenicians" argument because it doesn't matter to me, we're all passers-by. But you have to salute Said Akl's radical nationalism (and I'm not necessarily referring to his rather controversial political views here, only to his literary ones).

So Akl's "Lebanese" is a Latinate version of colloquial Arabic, rooted in ancient Phoenician script. It uses Latin letters in addition to a few newly designed letters and some accented Latin letters to suit the Lebanese phonology. Below is an image of his alphabet.

So I decided to try out the "Lebanese Oldies" series digitally and here's what it looks like! So what do you think? Should I rework the others too?























Sorry bout the name but a designer's gotta do what a designer's gotta do!

I had the chance yesterday to attend a typography workshop with Tarek Atrissi.
As a student, Tarek was always a sort of idol, himself being a lebanese student who travelled abroad for studies and then settled in the Netherlands to start a studio that will later on handle the most innovative arabic typography projects worldwide.

What was quite interesting about the conference/workshop is seeing the process of some projects and making out the difference between calligraphy, typography and lettering. I had always thought that I needed to be excellent at calligraphy in order to come up with good typographic design. Tarek made it clear that a designer can not be a calligrapher unless he puts lots of effort and most of his time into calligraphy. That is why a designer's job is mainly to know how to art direct calligraphers and typographers. I've always been someone who needs to be great at everything or nothing at all so this kind of gave me a wake up call to change my perspective!

I think I'm developing carpal tunnel syndrome from sketching and resketching the letters and moving from the sofa to the desk to the window! My room is anything but ergonomic.


Sami Clark was actually reviving the Golden Age at Orientis last weekend along with Abdou Mounzer and Petit Prince, but I found out about it a bit too late! I love it when there's a general wave of reviving Lebanese history. I think we forget too much as Lebanese.

This song should be in every lebanese wedding if you ask me. Enjoy it!

This is the most free-spirited arabic song I can think of! It's been a long time since I colored anything by hand but to honor the spirit of the song I thought I'd give it a go. The scanning kinda ruined it though! I'm thinking next up should be a Sami Clark song, who doesn't love that guy! :)

Enjoy the video!

There's nothing like a good old lebanese song to put a smile on my face. And this is my try at reviving these songs! This will be part of a series, experimenting with arabic typography. It's been ages since I've done any experimentation and I'm still not sure if this is the final version. So what do you people think?

For those of you who haven't heard about the event yet, Typographic Matchmaking in the City is coming to Beirut!

  




























The Typographic Matchmaking in the City project is a design research project investigating new approaches for bilingual lettering and poetic narrative for public space. The project have proven to be highly inspirational for the participating designers; it brought together designers from different cultural backgrounds to intensely collaborate, over a period of 2 years, on creating coherent products with groundbreaking results. This project shows the important role that design can play in initiating cultural change, assimilation and integration—by simply using our daily basic communication mode: the written word.