El HEMA Project
El HEMA is a non-commercial cultural project by the Mediamatic Foundation in Amsterdam.
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24 Aug 07 17:00>6 Jan 08
Stichting Mediamatic | Post CS Building, Amsterdam (view on map) | T +31 20 638 9901 | www.mediamatic.net
El Hema logos -
Left: new logo, designed by Wael Morcos. Right: old logo, designed by Tarek Atrissi in collaboration with Huda Smitshuijzen AbiFares. Arabic font used as basis for the logo is TheMix Arabic, designed by Lucas de Groot and Mouneer Al-Shaarani).
What would an Arabic HEMA look like? Halal sausage? Arabic chocolate letters? Affordable high quality headscarves? 3 Palestinian scarfs (kaffia) for the price of 2? Tunics or Djballas? School notebooks with lining for Arabic, which reads from right to left? Ali Baba and the 40 store robbers? Camel milk? Arabic poetry on duvet covers? Jibril and Jamilah children's champagne? North African wine?
El-Hema exhibition t-shirts -
Dawn and Najah in their vintage El HEMA t-shirts. The 'old-school' El HEMA logo was designed by Tarek Atrissi using TheMix Arabic from the Khatt set of fonts. TheMix Arabic was designed by Lucas de Groot and Mouneer Al-Shaarani with the support of Pascal Zoghbi.
Ali Baba book cover -
The El Hema edition of Ali Baba is a joint publication of Bulaaq publishers and Mediamatic Foundation.The book cover is designed by Huda Smitshuijzen AbiFares (in the style of the El Hema identity). The fonts used on the cover are Seria (designed by Martin Majoor) and the Arabic font Sada (designed by Pascal Zoghbi and Martin Majoor, as a matching font for Seria and as part of the Typographic Matchmaking project initiated and developed by the Khatt Foundation).
We are celebrating the opening of El HEMA in conjunction with the Khatt, Kufi & Kaffia | Symposium on Arabic Visual Culture. At the symposium, 5 new Arabic fonts will be presented. The fonts are a result of a special collaboration of Dutch and Arabic typographers which was organized by the Khatt Foundation. That is also when the book Typographic Matchmaking will be publicly presented and released. In that book, Huda Smitshuijzen AbiFares will describe the intercultural collaboration that led to the new letters and new insights into Arabic type design.
Of course El Hema will mostly use these fonts!
El Hema does not belong to the Dutch HEMA B.V. nor any other store.
For more infromation about this project you can visit the Mediamatic site.
