Posted by Tarek Atrissi

For the second year, I will be a guest critic at the School of Visual Art’s workshop in Design History, Theory and practice in Venice and Rome. An exciting two weeks intensive workshop with some of SVA’s top faculty and some guest Italian faculty members. A great opportunity to experience a design course from SVA in a European context. More info on the workshop can be seen on the following link http://design.sva.edu/masters_workshop_italy/

By Tarek Atrissi

I was glad to take part of the graphic design week in Saudi Arabia, organized by Dar El Hekma college in Jeddah, and witness the first event of its kind in the kingdom. On one hand, discovering the local charm of another Arab city was very exciting on all levels: Looking at the beautiful old areas of Jeddah; documenting the graphics and typography on the streets; and viewing closely wonderful examples of the traditional Hijazi architecture and style. On the other hand, the conference itself, entitled “Tawasol”, was a stimulating event that triggered a considerable local interest. Speakers included high profile international designers, design critics and communication experts such as Jonathan Barnbrook, Tea Triggs, Anja Lutz and Adbusters media foundation.
I personally enjoyed very much the lecture of Lebanese architect and artist Nadim Karam and his concepts and projects often narrating the “dreams of cities”: Projects such as the Archaic Procession urban art installation in Beirut Central District in 1997, a series of gigantic sculptures which I recall positively as a very curious addition to the city during my study years at the American University of Beirut. The talk of UAE national Mohammed Harib was highly appreciated by the audience: He is the creative mind behind the Middle East’s pioneering animated 3D series, Freej, a project celebrating the culture and tradition in the UAE through animated characters that literally became national heroes across the Emirates.

I gave a lecture and a workshop at the conference. The lecture was a critical look on emerging graphic design practice in the Arab world today. The workshop followed the same one day course module I gave in Kuwait a week earlier, consisting of a typographic lettering exercise that invited senior and junior graphic design students to “design” an Arabic word of their choice. Sketching the graphic and typographic endless possibilities of a specific word lead to very interesting results, some of which are previewed below. They ranged between calligraphic solutions, geometric ones, and freehand lettering style.

Selected work from the workshop. Top, right to left: Zainab Al Mashat, Nouf Ahmed Dahran , Marya Bakhsh, Alaa El Khereiji, Amnah Naghi, Amna Kamel.

All in all, I was most impressed I think by seeing the emerging graphic design scene in Saudi Arabia and the motivated young generation of local Saudi female designers highly interested in design and typography. It was not surprising then to pick up a local graphic design magazine, “Design”, initiated by one of the graduates of the graphic design department of Dar El Hekma college.

By Tarek AtrissiThe Atrissi-Sans Typeface is quickly taking a life on its own, and I am pleased to see it in use in so many large scale projects across the Arab world. Despite its recent and short release time, Atrissi-Sans font became our best selling Arabic font at Tarek Atrissi Design. The three weights font family was initially designed on a commission and was further developed at later stages and released earlier this year.Al Wataniya airways chose the Atrissi-Sans font for usage as its main communication Arabic typeface, used on al printed, interactive and screen promotional and marketing communication material by the airline. The New Kuwait based airline is the latest new comer to a growing competitive Middle Eastern airline market. Its simple and straight forward identity required the use of geometric yet friendly modern Arabic typeface, which will work well with the Latin font Corbid, and Atrissi-Sans fitted all these requirements.The new branding of the Egyptian Nile Channels (Drama channel, Sports channel, Life channel, Cinema channel) used as well the Atrissi-Sans font for all its on air and off air typographic communication. We have been involved in the design of Arabic fonts for television extensively for the last few years, and with the usage of Arissi-sans on all the channels of the major Egyptian Television network, this typeface is becoming highly visible and making our “on air” typographic presence in Arabia even wider and more exciting, and covering a significant part of northern Africa.The actual logos of all channels used our Al-Ghad Arabic typeface for all the main channels’ signatures.Both Al Ghad typeface and the Atrissi-Sans arabic font can be ordered by contacting us directly at Tarek Atrissi Design.

By Tarek Atrissi

Earlier this year we designed a custom Arabic font for the new BBC Arabic TV channel. A similar yet different project came our way afterwards at Tarek Atrissi Design: Designing a unique Farsi font for the new BBC Farsi TV channel, which will officially start broadcasting later this year.

Above: Preview of the Persian font designed for BBC Farsi, and a preview of its on-screen usage.

Despite dealing with a similar script; and with the same client, the recent Farsi type design project took a very different path from the previous Arabic type project. Certainly, we learned from the process of the Arabic font: Learned more on the process of work with BBC; on the testing and technical issues accompanying the project; and on the context in which the font will be used and the goals it wanted to achieve. We also learned from the simple experience of watching BBC Arabic today, and seeing the outcome of our work “in use” in the daily news reporting. All this of course affected our approach to this similar project, and made us work on it with a supportive experience. Most important, the brief given to us by the Persian Editorial team was very different from the brief of BBC Arabic, if not opposite. The unique font that was required to be developed for BBC Farsi needed to be “subtle”, not visually imposing or with a strong character and being hence “transparent” to the reader and not calling undue attention to it. It needed then to follow the traditional and commonly used Farsi Typefaces in Iran, for it not be a visible and strong change of type style for the average viewer. The typeface still needed to look modern however, despite being inspired from the traditional. It needed to be designed to address a better legibility, particularly on screen resolution, and to work smoothly with the on-screen layout and information design of the new channel, particularly with relatively short ascenders and descenders.

Above: Sketches and images from the process of the Farsi type design project

The result is a new low contrast typeface with a contemporary look and feel and with open counters; optimized for best usage on TV screen; A typeface supporting Arabic and Persian languages, and ideal for usage for good legibility and a subtle modern character. The font is not exclusive for BBC and hence will be take a life on its own, beyond its life on the Farsi News Screen. Details on licensing this typeface will follow shortly.

By Tarek Atrissi

Another Arabic Logo Adaptation assignment; and again in Holland, where the discussion of the influences of the Arab world as well of the Muslim world on the country, leads to many demands for adapting certain well known Dutch brands into Arabic. Volkskrant Magazine, the weekly publication that accompanies the Daily Volkskrant Newspaper, published a special issue dedicated to the positive influences that islam has brought into the social and cultural life in the Netherlands. The Arabic lettering created then aimed to imitate the structure and rhythm of the very familiar Volkskrant Logo, resulting in a distinctive Arabic lettering style used for the logo adaptation, and for the magazine’s special masthead for this issue.

Preview of the Arabic Lettering adaptation for the logo / masthead of the dutch Volkskrant magazine (issue 423- 100% Politiek correcte moslim-special)