Reem Al Zahabi

Whenever I develop a logo, I always design peripheral materials like stationery, business cards, and signage. Even if these aren’t requested in the brief, I find it necessary to test how the logo might perform alongside blocks of text and other design elements.

In this case, these tests turned out to be worthwhile, as I discovered that many of the logo comps I developed simply couldn’t work in the wild, even if they seemed fine by themselves.

The second image shown here is an example of this. Zapfino is an excellent font, and I felt it matched the Arabic script nicely, but it turned out to be far too loud alongside paragraphs, and it didn’t work in all sizes. Fira Sans is more neutral and is easier to read at any scale.

Kuwait is a small and wealthy country in the Arab Gulf. Its architecture is striking and memorable, and my first impulse was to incorporate it into the logo somehow. These comps of text alongside famous Kuwaiti buildings were not meant to be final (Reem Al Zahabi’s real estate business didn’t involve any of these buildings), but these were exercises I performed in order to find a good juxtapposition between the lettering and Kuwaiti architecture.

I eventually settled on Fira Sans. The slanted caps and eccentric styling of various letters, like the foot of the l and the tall lowercase i, are a great match for the skyline shown in behind this text.

For the gazelle illustration, I studied the facial features of gazelles and sketched them both freehand and with tracing paper. Their features, while pretty, didn’t quite fit the look that I wanted, so I exagerated some features, like the eyes and ears, and muted some others, like the mouth and horns.