Style combination · Contrasts

Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art × Lebanese Civil War Party Poster

Beirut's martyr posters were issued by parties marking walls as territory; Cairo's martyrs were painted by artists who said they had nothing to do with any party. Compare them to judge whose voice a commemoration speaks in.

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

Mix them and make something Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art Lebanese Civil War Party Poster

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art, their arrangement from Lebanese Civil War Party Poster, the finish from Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art. 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) Lebanese Civil War Party Poster

Type from Lebanese Civil War Party Poster: Hand-lettering
Brush & pen calligraphy
Colour from Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art: Full polychrome
Earth & mineral
Form from Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art: Folk & sacred symbols
Stylised figuration
Composition from Lebanese Civil War Party Poster: Central symmetry
Single focal point
Surface from Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art: Painterly brushwork

The type

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

Display · Lebanese Civil War Party Poster

Wake

Rakkas, standing in for Hand-lettered Arabic headlines in Naskh, Thuluth and Ruqʿa styles for martyr names, epithets, slogans and Qur'anic verses

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 Lebanese Civil War Party Poster. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art (Mohamed Mahmoud Murals) Lebanese Civil War Party Poster

#ede7da ground · 36%
#161616 ink · 14%
#c8102e accent · 18%
#f2c12e accent · 14%
#c8963e accent · 10%
#a2482b accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #ede7da;
  --ink: #161616;
  --accent-1: #c8102e;
  --accent-2: #f2c12e;
  --accent-3: #c8963e;
  --accent-4: #a2482b;
  --font-display: "Rakkas", 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.

Lebanese Civil War Party Poster: These posters show real people who were killed, many of them young partisans whose families are alive, and some glorify attacks carried out as 'martyrdom operations'; most of the parties that issued them are still active and the war's memory remains contested in Lebanon. Do not use martyr portraits, party emblems or Shiʿa devotional imagery as edgy 'war poster' decoration: cite the posters as historical documents with their archive, have every Arabic line read by a fluent reader, and remember that a party's colours and symbols still align a design with one camp. Hizbullah is banned in several countries, for example the UK (proscribed in full in 2019) and Germany (a 2020 ban on its activity that covers its symbols), where displaying its emblem can itself be an offence. The collections and Maasri's book also lean towards the Left and its Palestinian allies, while the Christian right fought its image war mainly on television, so the leftist look is not the whole war.

The two styles

A distressed, Egyptian-inspired illustrated poster centres on a young man with an eye bandage, a red halo and outspread multicoloured wings beneath the words “STILL HERE.” Military portraits, riot police, a funeral procession, Egyptian deities, flowers and birds fill the surrounding ochre, red, blue and black composition.

2011–2014 · Middle East & North Africa Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art (Mohamed Mahmoud Murals) 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.

A vintage-style poster shows a black-and-white portrait of a young man wearing a patterned scarf, flanked by mirrored armed figures and red flags. Red Arabic lettering appears beneath a cedar-tree emblem with yellow rays, with mountains and buildings across the top and green leafy branches below.

1975–1990 · Middle East & North Africa Lebanese Civil War Party Poster The posters that some twenty parties and militias pasted on the walls of Beirut and other towns between 1975 and 1990, marking each quarter as one faction's territory. With no state style, every party branded its sheets with its own name, emblem, colours, leader and slogans. The staple was the martyr poster: a public obituary with the fallen partisan's straight photograph, name and dates under a header naming the party, often with its emblem, issued in series. Leftist parties also commissioned painters, and Hizbullah and Amal had martyrs painted into symbolic scenes.

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