Alwan338

Attracting the attention of the Manama public with a black and white series consisting of countless individual posters.

Client
Al Riwaq Art Space

Year
2014

Services
Visual Identity
Newspaper
Exhibition Design
Poster Series
Workshops

Background
Alwan338 is an annual exhibition project by Al Riwaq Art Space in Manama, Bahrain. Each year 20 international and 20 local artists are invited to create art pieces in public space within the block 338 – the area Al Riwaq is situated in. 2014 we were invited to develop the identity for the exhibition and furthermore take part as artists. We developed a visual concept for a series of countless individual posters which were pasted in public space all around town.

Photos by
Sergio Miranda, Ahmed Buasally, Chris Lawrence

The visual identity and poster series we designed for the Alwan338 Festival is based on three concep­tual approaches.

Foundations

We developed four bold pat­terns consisting of repeti­tive basic graphic elements aligned to a linear grid. The graphic elements serve as foundation /basis of the visual identity and form the connec­ting links between graphic and typographic compositions.

Bilingualism

Working with Arabic and Latin is an exceptional challenge as not only two different languages but two different scripts with opposite reading and writing direction confront each other. We approach each bi-scriptual project indi­vidually. For Alwan 338 we developed a typographic grid allowing us to simply rotate the respective media by 180° in order to place the contents of the opposing languages. Both languages form each others foundations.

Alwan (Arabic for Colours)

White represents the presence of all colours, whereas black is an absence of colour. Obvious enough for us to keep our artwork black and white.

Also the design of the Alwan 338 newspaper is based on a typographic grid that allows us to simply flip the contents of the opposing languages. This way Arabic and English are treated completely equal and readers of both languages browse through the paper the same direction – they just have to turn the publication upside-down.