The Arab Film Archive is an initiative that aims at collecting and digitizing classical arab films in order to make them accessible for educational and research purposes. It is a project that provides a temporary answer to the ongoing monopoly of hundreds of Arab movies that were sold under complete exclusive rights to private TV networks back in the ‘90s and early 2000s without any consideration of the need to provide them on an institutional right basis for education and/ or individual research. The Arab Film Archive is founded by Ahmad Ameen, a film researcher and writer currently based in Amman.

This website contains a huge collection of what is known as blank video cassettes from the time period of 1977-2002 mostly made between Japan and the USA.

A Visual Reference of Form and Colour in Architecture and the Decorative Arts – The complete and unabridged full-color edition
First published in 1856, The Grammar of Ornament remains a design classic. Its inspiration came from pioneering British architect and designer Owen Jones (1809–1874), who produced a comprehensive design treatise for the machine age, lavishly illustrated in vivid chromolithographic color. Jones made detailed observations of decorative arts on his travels in Europe, the Middle East, and in his native London, where he studied objects on display at the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations in 1851 and at local museums. His aim was to improve the quality of Western design by changing the habits of Victorian designers, who indiscriminately mixed elements from a wide variety of sources

Arab art as seen through the monuments of Cairo: From the seventh century to the end of the 18th is an immense, sumptuously produced work that illustrates the richness of Islamic art and architecture as seen in the streets, buildings, monuments, decorative arts, and books and manuscripts of the city of Cairo. It was produced by Achille-Constant-Théodore-Émile Prisse d’Avennes, who is said to have supervised the printing of the work as well as that of his other masterpiece, a luxurious atlas of ancient Egyptian art. 

With archival records nearing about two hundred thousand digitized items dealing with various historical and social axes, the Palestinian Museum Digital Archive illuminates over 200 years of the Palestinian narrative through photographs, artworks, audio recordings, and documents threatened with damage and loss. The archival records cover the entire geographic scope of Palestine, in addition to Jordan and Lebanon.

A resource to trace, share, and enable community enrichment of the modern art heritage of Iraq. Explore the works by artist, browse through related textual materials, or add your own images or stories to the archive.

A collection of digital Arabic, Persian, and Turkish periodicals and journals from the 1860 to 1945 made available for the public. The collection is assembled from different libraries and hosted in one location.

The collection is hosted by Universität Bonn

A San Francisco nonprofit center for inspiration, education, and community, with a collection of over 60000 items related to lettering, typography, calligraphy, and more.

This initiative aims to preserve, document, and publish Arabic street signs, arabic type, signages, and street typography. Through organizing walks (expeditions) driven by curiosity and a shared interest of Arab cultures. The project spans between different countries including Lebanon, Egypt, Palestine, and Morocco.

Signs of Conflict is a project that involves collecting, archiving, and studying the Lebanese political posters produced by the different parties and movements during Lebanon’s civil war. It is premised upon the idea that the posters unfold the narratives of the prevailing political conflicts while providing insights into modern Arab visual culture. The signs of conflict project’s output include an ARCHIVE, related EXHIBITIONS, and PUBLICATIONS.

Get The Book

This unique graphic arts collection of around 130.000 posters from 150 countries, mainly on political-social issues and the performing arts represents the most extensive and diverse privately owned archive of this kind. It forms a comprehensive visual-aesthetic database, tracing and documenting a myriad of historical events and cultural trends over more than half a century worldwide.

I first began collecting Palestine posters when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco in the mid-1970s. By 1980 I had acquired about 300 Palestine posters. A small grant awarded with the support of the late Dr. Edward Said allowed me to organize them into an educational slideshow to further the “third goal” of the Peace Corps: to promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans.

Syrian Print Archive is a documentary project that aims to archive the development of all the variable uses of Arabic typography and graphic design elements applied in Syrian prints, Bringing this design heritage back to life and introducing it to youth designers and anyone of interest as an open-source. 

The Arabic Design Archive is a research initiative that is aiming to preserve, document, and disseminate historical material about Arabic design. The project’s goal is to make these materials available for scholars, students, and practitioners to facilitate research and publishing about the history of Arabic design. The project has a collection of book covers, stamps, posters, lobby cards, flyers, film titles, cassettes, VHS tapes, and other materials.

Press:

VICE ARABIA

SCENE ARABIA

CAIRO SCENE

ITS NICE THAT

AL AHRAM

Al FANAR

Print Mag

Frizzifrizzi Mag

Creative Review

Egyptian Streets

Arabic commercial archive is an extension of the Arabic cover design archive project. This project unearth commercial design from books, magazines, and publications from the 30s to mid-90s.