Co-Founders and Designers of Wajha, Hussein Alazaat and Ali AlMasri will talk about Wajha’s upcoming plans, and how its development affected the design scene in the Arab world.

Arabic / Free

Wajha is an independent social initiative that uses design and branding knowledge to help the community by offering design services free of charge. Taking its name from the Arabic word for ‘facade’, Wajha’s design work mostly takes place on shopfronts. The project is founded by Hussein Alazaat and Ali Almasri, whose creative interventions are applied where they are needed in the city. Wajha brings design to public space and uses the city’s facades as an empty canvas for experiments in typography, illustration, and graphic design. Wajha hopes to stimulate the local community to talk more about ‘design’ and to use social networking to respond to these creative interventions.

Alazaat has worked for various clients in diverse industries from the UK, Germany, Turkey, the USA and the MENA region and believes in the power of Arabic calligraphy in modern brands and products. He graduated from Amman School for Graphic Arts, and earned a Graphic Design Diploma from London Art College via distance learning. In 2012, he cofounded 'Wajha', a social, cultural, and design initiative that helps small businesses and shop owners in need of free-of-charge branding works for their shops.

Ali Almasri is a type and graphic designer who holds multiple degrees in graphic and industrial design. His portfolio is diverse across the area of branding and corporate identities, print design, and type design. His work experiments with multiple digital and analogue media and explores new visual languages relating in particular to the Arabic visual culture. He cofounded Wajha, an independent social initiative that uses design and branding knowledge to help the community by offering free design services and in 2014, launched his own type foundry, Abjad.

• Website: www.wajha.org
• Facebook: WajhaProject
• Instagram: @wajhaproject
• Twitter: @wajhaproject