Arabic Cover Design Archive

The Arabic Cover Design Archive is one of the selected projects for our Parallel Sphere grant, launched in June 2020, in response to the global limitations faced by cultural and art sectors due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The project is aiming to create a digital archive for Arabic cover designs to fill the gap between modern and past practices of design and allow conversations within the designers’ field about techniques, graphic treatments, and characteristics of design in different eras. The researchers started with collecting and gathering material, mainly books and magazines, and putting them in a historical timeline so they can organize, categorize, and collect the information on each cover design to go deep into the era, the design style, the method, etc. All the material will be available online, on the Design Repository’s website, for researchers, students, artists, and the interested public.

The project’s current team of four – Egyptian graphic designer Moe Elhossieny leading and managing the research, accompanied by two volunteer assistant researchers, Omayma Dajiani based in Palestine, and Yaman To’meh in Lebanon, and two assistant researchers: Karim Fouad, based in Cairo, and Sophia Alami in Casablanca, to go through the meticulous three-stage process of archiving these book covers.

Check the covers here: https://www.instagram.com/arabiccoverdesignarchive/