Show Us Your Type – Beirut

Show us your type is a project about typography and cities. Every now and the people in charge pick a new city and post a call for submissions. There are only few rules, the name of the city should be part of the poster design and the size of the poster is fixed to 396 px x 559 px.
Anyone with internet and some free time – or some unfinished doodles – can submit a piece. One hundred pieces are selected to be showcased on the website.

The title of the project Show Us Your Type implies that every time the project is launched a new set of typographic posters would mirror the idiosyncratic identity of a city and the culture it fosters. The virtual nature of this pseudo-gallery however brings together submissions from all over the world, as shown by the captioned work. Most of the submissions come from people who aren’t residents of the city but people who based their artwork on preconceived notions and internet searches for what that place is about and what landmarks it holds.

What is meant to be reviving showcase of handpicked typographic work ends up as a collection of imagined realities.

The latest exhibition was about Beirut. Several posters had disconnected reversed arabic characters; a result of not knowing the language and not having the Middle Eastern version of the Adobe Creative Suite. Other posters used arabic letters by layering them in a textural and gratuitous approach that fetishizes the oriental look of the Arabic script more than anything else. A lot of the designs submitted from Lebanon however, portrays Beirut as a self-destructing burning city, a response to the recent yet familiar situation.

Below is my submissions, probably a mix of all the above.

Justification Posters

Kashida is a type of justification used in the cursive connected Arabic script. In contrast to white-space justification, which increases the length of a line of text by expanding spaces between words or individual letters, kashida justification is accomplished by horizontally elongating characters connections at certain chosen points. Kashidas have been used by calligraphers not only to justify text but to impose a desired aesthetic flexibility in compositions.
The two posters use Kufam typeface to push the concept of justification and question Readability, Texture and Figure/Ground relationships.

The posters were part of the RISD Graphic Design Graduate Student Exhibition (2011) at the Sol Koffler Graduate Student Gallery.

Kufam is a bilingual typeface originally commissioned by Khatt foundation, part of the Typographic Matchmaking project.

Quickness: Death is hidden inside the clocks

In his book Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Italo Calvino discusses six literary values that he deemed important for the future generations to understand. His ideas apply to the literary discipline as much as to any creative process that involves communication as a tool to achieve a certain goal. In his chapter Quickness, he talks about the speed in which meaning unfolds. For him, quickness is not only the speed, but more the acceleration of the speed or lack thereof. Quickness is the rhythm with which the narrative action unfolds. Within the framework of such an elastic notion of Time, digression is the best way to avoid the unstoppable rolling towards the end, towards Death. Death – as he says – is hidden inside the clocks.

The following are typographic interpretations of the word Quickness and its meanings: Class: TYPE III, Doug Scott, RISD.

El Hema 2007 exhibited

I just returned from Amsterdam. It’s my 5th visit to this city and going back feels like visiting an old friend. Central Station is still being built, trams smoothly glide over the canal bridges scaring away defiant pigeons and tourists from all over the world mischievously flock around coffee shops like children with wicked intentions. Although my impression of the place is still one of an outsider, I no longer feel like a first-time tourist and I definitely enjoy the systematic pace of a city with a high pragmatic aesthetic sense. Amsterdam still stand-up to its gedogen reputation for being a city of lust and liberty, despite recent political developments and the political success of the right wing anti-islam party.

It is in this context of widespread discord within the Dutch and wider European societies that the El Hema Exhibition/artshop was born in 2007. Mediamatic recruited young designers from the Middle East to set up the exhibition that would be the launch event of Khatt Foundation first typographic matchmaking book. I was a designer on board and during my 7-week week stay I worked with a group of fellow designers on transforming the “Hema” brand to “El Hema” a space that playfully explores the Arabic-Dutch cultural exchange.

This dutch approach of doing things is coupled with the rich culture of the Middle East to bring out an art exhibit that informs about design, typography and cultural exchange. The design tasks I was directly involved in included the new El Hema logo design, shop signage,  identity adaptations as well as “Ana Amsterdam” T-shirt design, chocolate letters packaging, typographic underwear and scarf designs. Fairuz’s song about the watermill (tahouni) became typographic patterns echoing the Dutch windmills and Abou nawwas‘ poetry unabashedly found their way silk-screened on underwear pieces.

Hema, the department store chain, is the most public manifestation of Dutch culture. There are people who find their identity in churches, gardens or bathhouses. The Dutch identify with the Hema; the living monument to practical, colorful clarity and value of money. Mediamatic researches Arabic-Dutch art, design and culture. El Hema, the Arabic version of the typical Dutch department store, Hema, shows the consequences of this mixture. In this way, the Hema is the Alif and Baa (abc) of assimilation.

In 2007, El Hema exhibiton was awarded the first prize of the Dutch Design Awards in the “Visual Identity” category.

The project is currently part of the exhibition “100 Years of Dutch Graphic Design” at the Graphic Design Museum of Breda in a special corner set up to reproduce the El Hema exhibition/shop. The exhibition unfolds itself in an accompanying book “I don’t know where i’m going but I want to be there”. El Hema is also part of another exhibition in Amsterdam, “100 years classic Dutch advertising / 100 jaar reclame klassiekers”

El Hema in the Graphic Design Museum

Kufam

Historical, quirky  and viciously sleek, Kufam is a display typeface with a frisky attitude. Designed for the Typographic Matchmaking II, The Kufam project builds its inspiration from both the surprisingly vivid Archaic Kufi script and the urban Dutch lettering. As the Latin brings-in the uniformity of Western typography, the Arabic adds a sense of playfulness. The result is outfitting the calligraphic traditions of the Archaic Kufi script (7th century) with peculiar lettering from the Netherlands for a union made between Dubai, Friesland and Beirut. Kufam (Kufa - Amsterdam) was born.

Kufam is a collaboration with Dutch type design Artur Achmal and architect Richard Wagner

Typographic Matchmaking in the City: Kufam

The typographic matchmaking book is finally out! The project itself is a design research project investigating new approaches for bilingual lettering and poetic narrative for public space. The book not only documents the work of 5 teams of matched type designers from Europe and the Middle East but offers several essays discussing Design in the public space.

Kufam is the font that resulted from my collaboration with Dutch type designer Artur Schmal and architect Richard Wagner.

How do you get the clichéd dichotomy of east meets west interact at the level of th­­eir respective different writing systems? Where is Arabic typography today from the development of its Latin counterpart and to what extent should/can any of the scripts bend its rules to meet the other? How do you design when you cannot fully read/write the other script?

A potential lead into our project came from the notion of arriving in a city for the first time. An unknown territory so to say. In a situation like this, one is dependant on a visual supply of information like signage and way finding systems. Often this concerns information of a practical nature: the cityhall, the postoffice, the train station and so forth. This information lets one explore the environment in a superficial way: naturally every city has its postoffice or cityhall.

For one to get to know the city in a unique way other levels of information are required: cultural, historical, current, personal. This way not only the first timers will get an intimate impression of the city, but also it’s natural inhabitants.

When visiting Dubai for the first time you will yourself noticing in the presence of the Burj Dubai (ironically now called Burj khalifa) wherever you go in the city. It is the dominating landmark and like major urban landmarks it becomes a point of reference. This sparked the idea of using this landmark for to connect information to location within the urban environment. The tower, being itself built around a equilateral triangular base pointing to three different directions, lead to the idea of potentially using its view points to cover most of the areas of the city. The concept started taking shape around an attempt to create an interactive personalized kind of signage system where the medium is fixed but the message is constructed by the users themselves.

The aim was to position three large transparent screens at all three corners of the tower and connect these screens to a system that would display typographic messages on that screen. The intent however is to supply the screen with a system for sorting information that categorizes messages according to several parameters, be it content oriented (personal messages, formal information sharing) or spatiotemporal (date and location from which the message was sent). Accordingly, any message sent to that system from any device, such as computers or more practically phones, will be displayed on the transparent screen, pointing to the location it was sent from and displayed in a typeface that respects the nature of that message. The result is a continuously updated screen that offers real time information with constant interaction with the city view apparent from that location.

It is also interesting to consider the social repercussions of a popularization of such a system. Each screen is a potentially unifying platform where all kind of social discourses take place. It could be looked at like an auto-regenerating graffiti wall with an eye on the city. By highlighting what was there can be regarded as a tracker to the city’s evolution, expansion, and progression. It’s a tourist guide, and maybe even potentially a personal diary broadcasted live and online. In any way, the screen becomes representative of the streams of information transferred daily in an urban context. People from anywhere in the city could therefore send information to that screen, and observer in front of those landmark-positioned screens will enjoy the sight an interactive typographic signage system with the cityscape being its canvas.

The trip to the Islamic museum in Sharjah was an insightful visit. Old manuscripts were filled with beautifully crafted pages depicted diverse calligraphic works. I was particularly drawn to archaic kufi scripts.

The archaic kufi script reflects a peculiar aesthetic expression. It holds visual qualities that are viciously bold and surprisingly modern (in comparison to other scripts stylized in a very flowwy way). It roughly shares various similarities with the Roman type. Kufi has a strong emphasis on the vertical strokes, with the horizontal baseline thinner than the vertical stems. Its compact structure gives it an urban efficient feel that combines culture and heritage in modern visual traits.

For the Latin, Artur incorporated shapes of the of the lowercase Latin directly from this Kufi. A main characteristic being straight verticals bend in one movement into an arc or a bowl.

For the Latin capitals however, Artur found inspiration much closer to home: the streets of Amsterdam.

Amsterdam has a richness in lettering and signage on walls, buildings and storefronts. One thing that draws attention is a certain kind of disbalance in vertical proportion. One can clearly see this in characters B, R, P; they either feel to small or to big on top.’ Making sure they matched the lowercase in width en weight and detail, the overall feel has a cultural richness in it  that one cannot put it’s finger on directly.

Spice & Pepper

I want to sprinkle you with spice & pepper to give you taste*.

*meaning

Find the moon

Tomrrow is not Eid, despite most predictions and reshuffling of the work load to accommodate a very much awaited long weekend, Ayatollaha and mufits, the religious leaders of the main to Muslim sects in Lebanon: Shia and Sunni,  confirmed that the sighting of the new moon will not occur tonight. the New lunar month will not start tonight, Ramadan is not over yet. Practically, the weekend will not be as long as hoped, and the Motorcycle club logo presentation will have to be finished tomorrow.

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Typographic Matchmaking in the City 2.0

The Khatt Foundation, curated by Huda Smitshuijzen AbiFares, launched the Typographic Matchmaking sequel — Typographic Matchmaking in the City V2.0 project — which focuses on typography’s use in place making within an urban context.

Just like the first Typographic Matchmaking project, there are 5 teams of matched designers, only this time there architects are on board, along with major new ingredients. This time as well, my friend Khajag Apelian and I, are both part of 2 of the teams in the project.

What remains the same:
5 teams of designers from Europe and the Middle east.
One Purpose: create 5 pairs of matching Latin and Arabic typefaces.
Showcase the result in a book and an exhibition (typographic Matchmaking, El Hema).

What’s new:
Each team now includes an architect.
Latin and Arabic typefaces are both created from scratch.
The outcome is not a text face but a display one inspired from the urban cities of Europe and the middle east, more specifically Amsterdam and Dubai/Beirut.
Showcase the process and the result in a book and a participatory public art space.
A group of designers and film makers accompany the project and the teams, documenting each step to produce the book and a documentary movie. Both the film feature and the book are to represent means of exploring the project as a creative process and and a showcase for the outcome.

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