Typographic Dubaď ©T. Atrissi

This online typography and design course mainly consists of documenting, analyzing, studying and working on the natural and unique graphic and typographic environment that surrounds us in the Arab world.

• Teacher: Tarek Atrissi
  See his website.

• Course objectives:
1 – Learning about the unique Arab culture in what it presents in terms of visual environmental language, and appreciate this and use it more in future projects;

2 - Coming up with an end product of environmental typography in print, multimedia, photography and 3D both in an experimental, conceptual design approach. A printed piece, a series of printed typographic pieces, a short animation or a short video, a typographic experiment, a graphic or typographic story or an installation concept.

• Introduction:
The course aims to encourage students to appreciate the visual environmental language that surrounds them and to see the common and different aspects of the street typo-graphic language across the Arab region. 

It investigates the possibility of creating a graphic & typographic based design or multimedia language that belongs to the students’ own surrounding, a visual language that is unique to the location where the design work was produced, and that couldn’t be developed elsewhere. 

It is a mission to create a true “local” design, either in Print or Multimedia and to focus on motion graphics, based on the research, visual documentation, study, and concept development of the rich typographical local environment we live in.

• Practical exercise with graphical examples

Phase I
- Explain the goals of the course by sharing and discussing the resources;

- Share one’s own environment, mainly through photography or video footage. Select an area, a street or a corner in their city (or specific typographic area of interest) and visually document it in all possible ways, focusing on Arabic & bilingual typography, street signs, graffiti, hand written postings, neon letter, commercial store signage, popular street graphics or by documenting all aspects of their typographic area of interest;

- Analyze the collected visual data.

Ex 1: Typographic Visual documentation
Ex 2: Typographic Landscape of Dubai

Phase II
- Deconstruct and develop the collected graphic material;

- Create a collage of the collected images and graphically develop compositions into a series of typographic pieces.  Work could be done graphically and then incorporated in a New Media environment, or developed from the start as a motion based project.

Ex 1: Arab street typeface
Ex 2: Street Graphics and typography from three different Arabic countries

Phase III
- Develop a concept out of the exercise and define the final piece in terms of medium, idea, and visual style. All projects should be shared and posted online as an available online gallery of the results & projects created.

Ex 1: Graphics in the Environment in Qatar 
Ex 2: Typographic Landscape of the Arab World II 

• Reading material:
- Articles at:
www.atrissi.com/wordpress/
www.arabictypography.com/ , then select "Research"

- Student-Syllabus