Mapping for tourists - شمال

A group of 22 artists and designers from the Netherlands, Egypt and the Middle East have met in Amsterdam this summer (Jul-Sep 2010) for a mapping project initiated by the Mediamatic foundation.

The travel guide combines the results of the artists' research with practical information about the peripheral borough. The tourist design team consists of Khajag Apelian aka KJ, Lara Balaa, Lynn Amhaz, and Engy Aly. The travel guide was printed tabloid format, and was distributed along with Het Parool on September 10. With a circulation of 80.000, Het Parool is Amsterdam's number one newspaper. The travel guide is also available at Mediamatic Bank, Vijzelstraat 68 Amsterdam.

Images by Khajag Apelian

Beirut architectural guide: workshop led by Paolo Tassinari

An architectural guide to Beirut city, a group of senior graphic designers at LAU in March 2009 met with an Italian designer, Paolo Tassinari, working all together to design a publication of the multiple facets of beautiful Beirut. I worked on 3 spreads presenting the old light house, also known as Manara. In addition to that, we worked on the design of the table of contents, the impositions, the cover, the navigation system and the binding, to finally assemble all the students’ work in a coherent and consistent publication.

Culture'L catalogue

Client: Jeux de la Francophonie 2009- Beirut
Culture’L is a publication that informs the reader of the upcoming events during the week of the games. From art, to sports and literature, the publication is accessible, organized and enjoyable.
In collaboration with Alya Karame

Sookoon soft cover book

Sookoon, a book that explores the musicality of the Arabic script, the rhythm, the levels, the curvatures and the melodious flow of the letterforms. It also exposes my experiments with calligraphy and the reforms in Arabic typography.

Vignelli once said, “A good typographer always has a sensibility about the distance between the letters. We think typography is black and white. Typography is really white. It’s not even black. It is the space between the blacks that really makes it. In essence, it’s like music. It’s not the notes. It’s the space between the notes that makes the music.” It’s the silence.

Sookoon hard cover book

Full stop magazine

A bilingual magazine exposing the grid whilst comparing the different elements and choices a designer would make to optically balance the two scripts. The magazine article is a summary of my thesis, it also includes a profile of the Lebanese calligrapher Samir Sayegh, and an “I LOVE ARABIC TYPE” T-shirt.

Diacritics fanzine

A cheaply produced, hand- made fanzine that explores the musicality of the Arabic script, its relation to dance, the different voices of traditional and modern typefaces, among different concepts and experiments: Punchcutting with potatoes, letterforms in relation to hand movements in dance, font advertising, writing while listening to music.
A postcard is included as a souvenir.

Newspaper workshop

A workshop exploring the different characteristics of type in newspapers. The different weights used on a page are represented with scribbles, dark or light, scribbles that scream on the page leading the reader to dissect the information and read the most important things first, then throughout the articles. This experiment exposes the hierarchy on the page, from folios to headlines, text and captions. A second experiment explores the punctuation marks. Taking out the text and only keeping the comas, the full stops, the exclamation marks, the interrogation marks; exposes how many times the reader stops to catch his breath or to take a break. It is also a comparison between the Latin newspapers and the Arabic ones. Letters are rhythmic, but it’s the punctuation that marks the beat and the pace. A third experiment explores the characteristics of the typefaces used in Arabic newspapers. Done by replacing the space each letter occupies with vertical strokes to mark the shapes of the letters and its the ups and downs, reveals the nature of the Arabic script, it’s melody and variety. The strokes appear like pixels on a screen and even with the geometrical pattern on the page, it would sometimes remain legible! Another Arabic newspaper page was treated differently. Replacing the letters with horizontal stokes to critique the usage of such computer generated fonts that lack fluidity in comparison to the beautiful Arabic calligraphic script. The levels are reduced in order to fit more information on a single page for economic reasons; sometimes very difficult to read, and very tiring for the eye, newspaper fonts lose their character to become very stiff and digital on a printed slightly translucent page.