Rue Huvelin

I can now add one-time actor to my resume. Two years ago I had the great opportunity to be part of the cast of a movie production. This acting experience forever changed the way I could apprehend of a visual narrative. By gaining some understanding of “how it’s done” I also lost the ability to completely let go while watching movies.

‘Rue Huvelin’ is a story that highlights the daily lives of seven college friends in Université Saint Joseph Ashrafieh (Huvelin Street). The movie portrays the students’ efforts to organize off-campus  demonstrations calling for the drawback of Syrian troops (2003). Their continuous struggle against oppression within a sectarian social system often leads them to be prosecuted and tortured. Their fight for freedom culminates reaching a national level taking part of what became the most recent turn of events on the Lebanese political scene.

In parallel to playing the supporting role of one of the 7 friends, I found myself designing the communications material for the production. The concept developed from the character I played. Firas, a shy funny introverted character, is often the one who draws the demonstration banners.

Building on the vigorous spontaneity of banner drawing and the stealth attitude in organizing oppositional communication material, a typeface of narrow stacking capital letters was drawn with little or no conscious design planning. By drawing glyphs directly on Fontlab prior to any sketching and without going back to edit a glyph once done, the drafting of the letter-forms went against the traditional meticulous process of typeface design. The design therefore attempts to represent a fight for freedom that is as honest (naive maybe) as it is passionate. The custom typeface is used for the movie title, beginning/end credits, and website (Designed with M&C SAATCHI Beirut) as well as other communication material.

After screenings in Europe, Moscow, Canada and Brazil “Rue Huvelin” arrives to the Lebanese theaters unfortunately slightly censured. Ironically, the reasons remain the same.

Rue Huvelin trailer on Youtube

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.

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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