DUBAI: British Lebanese typography designer and creative director Samar Maakaroun is known for her multilingual approach to design.
This week, Maakaroun is speaking at the Innovation by Design Summit in Doha, hosted by sustainable property developer Msheireb Properties.
Maakaroun, the founder of design agency Right to Left, and her team were the minds behind the brand identity of last week’s seminal Together for Palestine charity concert in London.
On the night, celebrities from around the world gathered to raise funds for Palestinian-led organizations including Taawon, the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund and the Palestine Medical Relief Service.
“I couldn't approach this with like, ‘OK, I'm going to, you know, do something super slick,’ because it’s just not right,” she said, noting that when it came to designing posters for the event “this is not about who’s singing on that day … this is about making space for people to feel safe.”
The agency eventually settled on a powerful poster that featured negative space.
“Just black and white, cheap to print, maximizing fundraising efforts and sort of saying that this is a time to create space. Everybody feels very strongly about this so the white space was used to hold people’s feelings and emotions on this.”
Maakaroun, who is fluent in three languages, is also a partner at leading international design firm Pentagram, which was founded in 1972.
“I have come across projects that sort of have a foot in the Arab world, a foot in the Latin word, English or French,” Maakaroun said of her 20-year career.
“The issue when you have a second language is typically what people do in the GCC, is they create an English version, an Arabic version, and the bilingual version. What that means is you end up with three faces for one brand — so that’s not efficient,” she said.
“For me it’s important to actually create brands that represent this hybridity in people,” she said.
“The purpose in every project that I do is to end up with one mark because that’s more efficient, that’s ownable and that is more memorable,” she added, referring to a “mark,” or one of three types of brands or logos found in brand identity creation.
Working from a dual perspective is a key part of her creation and ideation process — “typically some GCC clients come to the UK to do a brand identity, they work with a company that’s only English-speaking people, start designing (in) English and then the Arabic version ends up being a translation of the concept that perhaps works in English, (but) doesn’t work in Arabic, (because) the letters are completely different,” she said.
Maakaroun counts coining the first integrated destination brand for Dubai with M&C Saatchi in 2015 as part of her portfolio of projects in the Gulf region. She also launched Apple’s brand in Arabic across digital, retail and print in 2017 and was part of the process of launching Saudi Arabia’s Diriyah City brand in 2019.
“When we create brand identities, we’re telling stories about who we are as people and what matters to us and what represents us … and for me, the key driver in my work is about representation.”
It is perhaps fitting then that Maakaroun took to the stage in Doha to discuss “The Language of Identity,” where she discussed what it means to work across several languages and cultures in her practice.
