Case Study
Chaumet Logo Arabization
Arabic logo design for the brand's flagship boutiques
Zainab AlShibani
Zainab AlShibani is a graphic designer and lettering artist based in Doha, Qatar. She explores dreamlike ideations of life, time, gender, and language. Zainab earned her BFA in Graphic Design from VCUarts Qatar in 2021, graduating magna cum laude with honors and receiving the AEB Excellence Award. In 2021, she joined Ektashif, an art trip in Istanbul hosted by MIA and the Ministry of Culture and Sports. A year later, she was an artist-in-residence at ISCP in New York, diving into silkscreen printing and artbook making. Zainab has led branding and logo design projects for local businesses including Studio7, YallaYoga, and The Cutting Studio. She has also championed screen printing through event activations across Doha at venues such as Clubin Studio, Galeries Lafayette, Qatar Reads, Liwan, and VCUarts Qatar. Her squeegee has been passed around to countless hands, and her majlis printing space continues to welcome artists and fuel her ongoing printmaking research.
Challenges
Alongside creating a cohesive design, I had to make sure that the new logo aligned with the original Latin logo. The Arabic letters have an ability to connect horizontally through Kashidas which is not possible in Latin Letters. Furthermore, the Latin letters tend to take on more of a vertical space, so balancing both languages can be difficult as they take different planes. The diacritics also posed a challenge as there were so many options to select from.
Solutions
For the logo, I researched different Arabic scripts and tried to figure out which styles best suit the project. I was also very cautious in the sense that I wanted to retain the integrity of the Arabic Script. After putting together, the sketch of the initial lettering, I then started to work on it intuitively to best align it with the Latin logo.
The Brief provided by M7 and Chaumet was very helpful as it served as a very useful guide for me to understand what the client was looking for and tailor the project accordingly.