Assembling a Relevant Design Culture
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.
Moe Elhossieny, Nourhan, Elbanna, Omaima Dijani, Yaman To’ma, Karim Fouad, Sophia Alami
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.