I decided to use Arabic instead of English for the expressive words portion. As an Iraqi, I find that Arabic often expresses sentiments in a manner English can’t quite. It’s also a language known for its calligraphic tradition, which I felt would make for a fun project.
I started with the word قهر, which I’ve always used as a word for grief. It also carries a stronger connotation with it, an overwhelming feeling, one of anger and sadness.
Here, I distorted the text, purposefully red. I think the grief felt amongst Arabs is a complicated grief, one that isn’t neat. It’s a grief that is constantly evolving and constantly in flux. We can’t stop to mourn the past because the atrocities continue today.
The tragedies occurring in Lebanon bring about this grief, just as everything that has happened in Palestine for the last year. I spoke with my mother over the phone earlier today, where she lamented, sorrowfully repeating, “beautiful Lebanon,” in Arabic. The conflict has always been difficult, and I think the geopolitical spread is making it even harder to comprehend. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu recently held up a map at the UN where he claimed that the Levantine Arab states were a “curse.” This map included Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and though not an Arab nation, Iran.
It‘s hard to process the pain inflicted upon my people in the past year, and envisioning the near future is even more sickening. The thought of the number of people displaced, and seeing that number increase, is also hard to process. I took the word وين, which colloquially means, “where?”
It’s an arc with scribbles, a question of where? Where should they go? I wanted to make it feel map-like, the arc emulating the earth cartographically, and the scribbles delivering the essence of the word with a bit of uncertainty. It’s not as stately as the original font, it wavers.
My final expressive word is انا, which means “I.” This is more tied to my experience on early geocities websites because of the texture I applied to the characters. I also wanted to make the text slightly reflective so as to make the word for I act as a mirror. With the presence of Geocities as early internet blog, I found this fitting!
My initials are pretty simple. My signature is pretty cool. I sometimes will use the stem of the P as part of the H. I decided I wanted to recreate that.
Look at that! Clever, right?
Video Reflection
As someone who works in Film, I wholeheartedly understand the importance of making all elements of a work feel connected in one united whole. There’s an importance to be placed on cinematography that can express emotion and aesthetics, production design that builds the world, and so on. I don’t think typography is really any different, and I don’t think that any medium exists in a vacuum.
It makes sense that all typography implies something about the object it describes. I also believe that this is a process that continuously evolves with the objects themselves—typography was never an innate phenomenon, and the typographical example of Berlin in the Ted Talk wouldn’t really be representative of Berlin if it wasn’t simply in fashion in Berlin in the 20s. I find that to be an interesting, almost ontological, facet of typography as a means of signaling information or qualities.