Style combination · Contrasts

Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art × Graffiti

Same spray can, opposite priority: New York writing makes the writer's name a letter-sculpture, while Cairo's walls are figurative and commemorative and the lettering is a caption. Decide whether the brief needs a name or a face.

From the research on Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art (Mohamed Mahmoud Murals)

Mix them and make something Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art Graffiti

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art, their arrangement from Graffiti, the finish from Graffiti. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

What each style brings

Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.

Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art (Mohamed Mahmoud Murals) Graffiti & Hip-Hop Graphics

Type from Graffiti: Hand-lettering
Type as image
Colour from Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art: Full polychrome
Earth & mineral
Form from Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art: Folk & sacred symbols
Stylised figuration
Composition from Graffiti: Illusion of depth
Diagonal axis
Surface from Graffiti: Hard offset shadow
Painterly brushwork

The type

Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.

Display · Graffiti

Fiesta

Sedgwick Ave Display, standing in for Wildstyle lettering

Text · Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art

The street art of Egypt's 2011 revolution and the years after it, when Cairo's walls, above all around Tahrir and Mohamed Mahmoud Street, became what Ammar Abo Bakr called a newspaper. Three idioms share them: portraits of martyrs with wings and eye patches; neo-Pharaonic friezes of mourning and marching women by Luxor-trained muralists; and sardonic caricatures, stencils and Arabic slogans against the army, Mubarak and later Morsi. Whitewashed again and again, the walls were repainted in reply.

Newsreader; Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art used Freehand Arabic slogans in spray paint and marker, sometimes with English lines, scrawled beside and over the pictures and Historical lām-alif ('no') forms collected from buildings, mosques, ceramics, textiles and books across the Islamic world, sprayed by Bahia Shehab

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art, with a counter-accent from Graffiti. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art (Mohamed Mahmoud Murals) Graffiti & Hip-Hop Graphics

#ede7da ground · 36%
#161616 ink · 14%
#c8102e accent · 18%
#c8963e accent · 14%
#00a3e0 accent · 10%
#a2482b accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #ede7da;
  --ink: #161616;
  --accent-1: #c8102e;
  --accent-2: #c8963e;
  --accent-3: #00a3e0;
  --accent-4: #a2482b;
  --font-display: "Sedgwick Ave Display", cursive;
  --font-text: "Newsreader", serif;
}

Use it with care

Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art (Mohamed Mahmoud Murals): These walls commemorate real people killed or maimed in 2011–13, whose families are alive, alongside images of women assaulted by security forces, Qur'anic verses and Coptic and Islamic sacred imagery; do not reuse martyr portraits, eye patches or the 'blue bra' as edgy protest styling for a brand, have every Arabic line read by a fluent reader, and credit the artists and photographers by name. The walls were also religiously contested: Awad painted some of his Pharaonic women nude as a stand against the Wahhabi style of Islam, and Salafists erased some martyr portraits and put Qur'anic verses in their place, so do not pair those figures with Qur'anic verses for effect. After July 2013 the interim government built its own martyrs' memorial in Tahrir, which protesters wrecked, and the Muslim Brotherhood staked its own claim to the revolution's dead, so check whose dead a reused martyr motif would seem to mourn. Political street art remains dangerous in Egypt: Ganzeer was detained in 2011, four graffiti artists were detained for 12 hours in May 2015 after painting a mural, and 400 copies of Walls of Freedom were confiscated in Alexandria for allegedly 'inciting violence', so never put Egyptian artists or collaborators at risk with work attributed to them.