Saudi Design Festival Branding

Year: 2023. Country: Saudi Arabia

Tarek Atrissi Design was commissioned by the Saudi Design Festival to revamp its branding and re-design the visual identity of the event by exploring innovative and experimental approaches in Arabic typography.

Inspired by the geometry found in Arabic calligraphy, we worked with variable font technology – to transform this geometry into infinite design possibilities. The identity’s main element consisted of a wordmark that is defined by 4 axes – each axis allowing to change the letterforms in weight, width, height and spacing.

 

 

The video above gives an overview on the design process- starting with handmade design explorations with the geometric kufi Arabic calligraphic style- and leading the digital development of the wordmark in the format of a variable Arabic font that would be used as a core element in the visual language.

 

The visual identity became typographically rich, offering a wide range of possible usage in layout an application design, using an interactive typographic visual language. The technology behind this variable typographic system, containing 4 different axes, has never been explored to such an extent within the Arabic script and in the context of branding, and offers a great experiment of the potential use of variable fonts in Arabic topography.

 

The Saudi Design festival was held in January 2023, using the new typographic visual identity system – which was applied in a variety of media ranging from print to digital to spatial design. The design was awarded a Graphite Pencil at the D&AD awards in London – one of the most prestigious international design awards. The Award given to the project recognizes the design as one of the best of the year in design, and a stand-out typographic branding solution that rises above the rest of top international design projects.

 



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