ELHARF Tour

I’ve guided the design and crafts tour during the 2nd edition of Amman Design Week, the title of the tour was named after my new established project: ElHARF, which will be the home of calligraphy and Arabic visual arts.

The tour started from Calligrapher Shehadeh Haroun’s shop, to meet him and learn from his experience in silkscreen printing, Haroun still using the old-school methods that he acquired from the sign painters of Damascus once he was there 50 years ago! I’ve collaborated with Haroun to produce the English lettering of Amman Design Week, and to demonstrate the essential skills and give some funny tips for the tour members.

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Dr. Fathi Gooda

A true creative from Egypt, an Arab pioneer in Typography and Lettering arts, he is the one behind designing the contemporary font of Cairo road and transportation signage in the early 80’s! Which makes Cairo the first Arab city that owns a custom font for its streets.

You can learn more about Dr. Fathi by reading this rare article from 1982 that I’ve dug from the Jordanian Architect Bilal Hammad’s archive in 2013. (Arabic)

Dr. Fathi (In Arabic د. فتحي جودة) was born in 1935, and still until the moment working as a design professor in the faculty of applied arts in the Helwan University.

My first encounter with the font when I saw it in Cairo metro stations, 2011.

Islamic Seals Design

I was impressed with this amazing collection of Islamic seals on different manuscripts from various Islamic cultures and ages, this database was collected by Chester Beatty Library in Dublin from their own fine archive of manuscripts, more than 2600 seal impressions were found and documented!

Yes, 2600!

I’ve picked some of them to share with you, copy rights are reserved to Chester Beatty Library:

identifier W.608.000703|date 2010-09-01|creator The Walters Art Museum (Baltimore/MD/USA)|contributor The Walters Islamic Manuscript Digital Project|contributor Bockrath, Diane|contributor Tabritha, Ariel|contributor Emery, Doug|contributor Gacek, Adam|contributor Gerry, Kathryn|contributor Noel, William|contributor Quandt, Abigail|format image/tiff|description This is an image of folio 351a from Walters MS W.608, Five poems (quintet), on paper, written by Ilyas ibn Yusuf Nizami Ganjavi, copied by Habib Allah ibn `Ali ibn Husam, Rabi II 971 AH / 1563 CE|rights Licensed for use under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported Access Rights, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/legalcode. It is requested that copies of any published articles based on the information in this data set be sent to the curator of manuscripts, The Walters Art Museum, 600 North Charles Street, Baltimore MD 21201.|source Walters Art Museum Ms. W.608, folio 351a|title Walters MS W.608, Five poems (quintet)|type Image|subject Codex|subject Manuscript|subject Persian|subject Walters Art Museum|subject Persian|subject Literary — Poetry

 

My next little project is to make one seal for my name inspired by these designs.. stay tuned!