10th Panorama of
the European Film
for Zawya

In 2017, Zawya approached me about creating the visual identity for the 10th edition of the Panorama of the European Film, a (mostly) annual festival bringing critically acclaimed European films to the Egyptian screen. I was very happy to work on it, because many years earlier I had created a godawful design for a previous edition of the PEF which I do not care to discuss, but what’s done is done and we must learn from the past (and ideally not dig it up). And learn I did: the 10th PEF was an opportunity to right my wrongs and to design from a more seasoned and mature place and create an identity I can still get behind many years later.

For this edition I wanted to talk about how film has the power to move you and to transport you; a simple message - and to communicate it I created images where cinema seats are transplanted into the middle of nowhere in a variety of landscapes. In terms of color, I chose two very loud and energetic colors, and switched between them in terms of foreground vs. background, while the images were set in black and white. I used the shape of the Arabic zero in the typeface selected (Molsaq designed by Abjad - big thanks to Ali Almasri) as a recurring element in the identity - partly in reference to the 10th edition and also because it looks like the outline of an eye, which felt serendipitous.

For the text, I was trying out playful ways to lay out English and Arabic together while still keeping a sharp sense of geometry in the identity and so I landed on this idea of dots/ the Arabic zeross connecting the Arabic and English sides, so that the overall text creates a rectangluar shape - making it flow more with the shape of the images. The identity has a fairly loose grid, which allowed it to be easily translatable into all the different applications and formats needed for the festival.

The following year, I worked on the 11th edition, which you can see here.