Have you ever read the endless information on a band aid? Neither have I.

When a first aid kit is in need, panic and/or pain would be reigning, scrubbing off any time to read complicated instructions. I designed this color coded first aid kit based on the idea of conveying directions of use in the fastest way possible. In the top panel of the kit are series of pictographs of symptoms, possible causes and the colors of medical items to use accordingly.

The design also makes this kit universal in terms of level of literacy.

SYMPOSIUM at NC STATE PROPOSAL

The Hive

At MICA, designers are trained to be generalists. We are authors and producers, researchers and developers, illustrators and copywriters; we work on projects from concept to completion. To subvert this process we have formed The Hive, a highly specialized agency. Like in a bee colony, each person has a distinct, siloed role. We stay within these roles and pass our finished materials down the chain, neither discussing nor interfering with others' work. 

For the conference, we presented our agency's website. The site shared our philosophy and described our process, talking a bit about each of our specialists.

In collaboration with: Kirby Matherne, Jackie Littman, Emma Sherwood-Forbes, Ben Chemelski, Nate Gulledge, Lolo Zhang and David Lam 

When you think of Lille Métropole, what comes to mind? The Olympics? Textiles? Nothing? The answer will be different depending on where you live, your profession, your travels; a multitude of personal contexts inform your ideas. The answer will always depend on the person, of course, but it is also shaped by the voice of Lille Métropole.
Today, this voice is not easy to hear. Lille’s current identity is the product of the past.
The image in our minds reflects industries that have waned in recent years. To resolve this issue, we propose a new visual identity for Lille Métropole. Applying such a system will communicate the district’s distinct personality, history, and future to the world, and will help Lille take its place amongst the commercial capitals of Europe.
Our new system reiterates this identity in a contemporary fashion, projecting a new future while building on an extraordinary past.

A collaboration with Yingxi Zhou, Emma Sherwood-Forbes and Richard Blake.

One of the first things one does after moving to a new city is try its public transportation. Baltimore’s system failed me, as much as it failed everyone I know living here.

I tried taking the bus few times but the ride was never pleasant. The bus would either not show up, the driver would see me and not stop, or the passengers made me uncomfortable.

I spent the day of October 21st hopping on and off the city buses, starting from north west of the city, all the way to the south east part. One thing I can tell you: it was eccentric.

You can view the website of this project here.

This year-long project pulled together content from the Maryland Institute College of Art's sixteen graduate programs to promote and record graduating student work. We developed an identity system that looks great on its own but can also showcase bright artwork, then designed and developed a responsive website, mailers, poster, and forthcoming print catalog.

Atlas in my Hands is a collection of eight books that sum up my persona. Each book is represented by a circle placed on the palm line relevant to how the book's content shaped me. Moreover, the intimate relation between my hands and each book is manifested across the pages, showing how the content of a book dictates the way I hold it.
The digital version of the book can be downloaded on ipads here.

We are in the midst of the age of new media. Any definition developed while in the middle of the experience cannot prove to be accurate. We are witnessing New Media shape its time-line, its trajectory, its definition. We found that this timeless suspension is often paralleled in the pieces labeled as New Media Art. These works give the audience this same experience of entering something in the middle, sometimes allowing the audience to shape the work and change it going forward.

To better explore this theme, we looked at nine new media projects that are time related. Some transport the audience to the past, others project them to the future. Some projects assemble audience from different times and/or locations into one time frame, others introduce the audience to the past of the place where they are in the present.

The animated icons map the experience of time in each project. The circle stands for an audience member; the filled in circle represents the audience that is a part of the piece and is actively generating or modifying the content. The square is an event, often a moment in time caught on film. The line is time, of course, marching forward and backward and always in motion.
In collaboration with Emma Sherwood Forbes.

Featured in The Dieline.

I have always wondered about the stories behind fonts with women's names. I studied the three typefaces: Mrs Eaves, Caecilia and Joanna. I decided to honor these three forgotten women in the history of typography through this project.

I chose the symmetrical ligature ae to reflect the intimate relation between the type designers and the special women after whom they named their typefaces. From there, I developed a set of three necklaces.

I designed the packaging of the necklaces as business cards considering the different identities these women represented. Joanna was Eric Gill's daughter, Mrs Eaves was Baskerville's housekeeper and mistress, and Caecilia was Peter Matthias Noordzij's wife.

EXPOSURE is a camera that will be traveling across the USA. The itinerary is Baltimore, NYC, Pittsburg, Nashville, Rochester, Dallas, San Francisco then back to Baltimore.
This project is a visual experiment that aims at representing the collapse of several locations into one space. The analog film strip will host photographs of seven different American states. 

The participants are Lebanese and are asked to capture the street signs on which they currently live, their home away from home. After doing so, they will change the provided post-stamps as well as the USPS to/from sticker.

Thanks to Ziad El Bizri, Victor Chedid, May Daher, Joe Eid, Abdallah El Sabbagh and Gilbert Haddad for their time.

I designed an insert for GOOD magazine, as a student project, with the text of "The Good Guide to Volunteering". The information is divided into ten panels and the interviews are rotated to differentiate them from the informational texts while creating a dynamic layout across the folds. The pull-quotes lay on pop-up squares for even more emphasis.

April 27 is the Lebanese Red Cross martyr's day. Every year a designer/artist creates a souvenir for this event.

I made these cubes in 2009 with cotton threads connecting the four sides of the plexiglass square. The knitting gives it depth and sense of unity while reproducing the Red Cross logo.

This is a psychology journal on obsessive compulsive disorders. The design of this journal follows the disorder it features every month, in this case: hoarding.
The page number stack as you flip though the pages and the cover is the overlay of all the pages in the magazine. The leading, tracking and upper case letters also reflect the obsessive acquisition disorder.

No one could’ve known that when a Tunisian fruit vendor set himself on fire in a public square, it would incite protests that would topple dictators and start a global wave of dissent. In 2011, protesters didn’t just voice their complaints; they changed the world.– Time magazine 

Making decisions makes us feel important, responsible and actively involved in our surroundings. In this project, based on the theme Chance/Choice, ice represents the power of protesting and its unpredicted outcomes. This analogy illustrates, through the color choices, the tens of self-immolation incidents during the Arab protests since 2010. 

Protests overthrew four Arab dictators and initiated a lot of economic concessions by other presidents. Ministers have resigned and several vowed not to run for other terms. The revolutions brought the Arab world a step closer to democracy, however my project is a reflection of the consequences of these protests. Civil wars have erupted leaving more than fourty thousand death casualties and tens of thousands of displaced people.

More Post geographic than Multinational is a conversation I found online between readers of William Gibson. I took the online conversation and transformed it to a print piece. It is broken down into three branches of topics discussed and points made.
Since the conversation ended in 2011, I decided to resuscitate it with three of my Lebanese friends who do not live in Lebanon anymore. The conversation was conducted on gmail. At a given point, I took the content of the thread and visualized it in a website.

I created later on a folder that would gather several fill out forms on migration.

Thanks to Omar El Bizri, Joanna Douba Jabak and Lynn Abdouni Saleh for their time.

Bala Taaleek ["no comment" in Arabic] is also a Lebanese pun for "do not steal electric power". In Lebanon, stealing power off the grid has been a recurrent problem resulting in accidental injuries or deaths, in addition to creating important financial losses in the national electric company.

I wanted to raise awareness about this problem through an installation on the electric cables of the neighborhood I grew up in. After simulating a neighbor's electrocution, I distributed a call for postmortem prayer. Then, I made tags that people would number and hang on their circuit breakers. I also circulated letters that the citizens would fill out with their circuit breakers' number and send out to the electric company asking it to fix the cable extensions.

Beyrouth is French for Beirut. BYEROUTH is the misspelled version of the word inducing leave-taking.

I stenciled this word of mine on a few crumbling walls in the city, during my last hours before moving to the USA. Few months later, BYEROUTH developed into a sketchbook that is currently traveling across the five continents, passing by 15 of my Lebanese friends residing in the diaspora. Each person prints his house key's pattern and pastes the stamps he/she received from the preceding country on a spread.

The text in the sketchbook is by the Lebanese poet Gebran Khalil Gebran entitled 'You have your Lebanon and I have my Lebanon' through which he redefines Lebanon as seen from afar. You can follow BYEROUTH's journey here.

Featured in Kalimat Magazine.

Maza Law? [What if?] is a card game that addresses the [absence of] history of the Lebanese civil war. Each card is a word cropped from a headline of a newspaper issued during the civil war. However, the cards in the game are shuffled and form a new headline every time the game is played. The random outcome suggests the highly subjective nature of traumatic memory.

The history of the Lebanese civil war [1975-1990] remains a personal experience to each and every one of us, a particular memory, image or a game of survival, blurring the threshold between fiction and reality.