JEDDAH, 16 May 2006 — A young Saudi woman has won an award for an advertisement she designed in a student competition in the United States proving once again that there are no gender boundaries or nationality prejudices for ambition. Hazar Bogary, 22, won the silver award at this year’s Kansas City OMNI Awards Student Competition for a poster design against drug abuse.
The OMNI Awards is a prestigious juried competition of top creative advertising that typically accepts only five to seven percent of the submissions by hundreds of student applicants across the US. The competition was organized by the American Advertising Federation and was held in February.
Bogary recently graduated with a degree in commercial art with an emphasis in graphic design from Central Missouri State University and returned to Jeddah to ponder whether to go for a post-graduate degree or start pursuing a career in graphic design.
“I’m into practical majors and couldn’t find a major here that fulfilled my interests,” she told Arab News. “I’m more into art like photography, but when I thought about job opportunities I decided that commercial art has a bigger work field, especially for women here.” Bogary joined her brother at the university after she heard it had one of the best commercial art departments in the country. She has already successfully applied for an MA in industrial management but she is considering starting her work experience instead, believing that would be more beneficial for her career.
“I wish to have my own advertising agency one day or become the art director at one of the big advertising companies here,” she said.
Her winning poster ad is simple yet effective.
For her final class project she chose drug abuse among high school students. In her research she found that the reason many of these youngsters start taking drugs is to be cool. Playing on the word “cool” and finding a picture of corpses gave her the idea for the poster. “My instructor was amazed that I can give such a strong message in a few words.
People are too busy to read a billboard ad so it had to be to the point and effective,” she said.
He encouraged her to submit her ad for the competition and two months later she was told of her award. “I didn’t expect it. I was so happy and excited. It made me feel I have the skills and made me proud of myself,” she said.
During her studies she also designed ads, logos and stationeries for many companies.
Bogary pointed out that she never faced any annoying situations in the US. “The people there are very nice, even when they asked me about my hijab they were polite and it was out of curiosity and not to harass me,” she said.
Perhaps the only problems she had were the change in education system and the adjustment.
“There the instructor made you think and rely on your own skills and judgment to figure things out. Here, you are supposed to give the answer that the instructor wants and according to the books. I wasn’t prepared for this change but they were very helpful. At first I just followed instructions like here instead of being creative; then I realized that the more different your approach and thinking was, the higher grades you got,” she said.
Bogary is now job hunting and will either start her career or go back to university for post-graduate studies.
