Style combination · Pairs well

Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art × Syrian Revolution Graphics

Its 2011 neighbour: Cairo painted martyrs and friezes onto walls, Syria made portable sheets for the camera; put a Syrian-style printable slogan beside a mural photograph to join wall and feed.

From the research on Syrian Revolution Graphics (Kafranbel Banners & Poster Collectives)

Mix them and make something Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art Syrian Revolution Graphics

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art, their arrangement from Syrian Revolution Graphics, 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) Syrian Revolution Graphics (Kafranbel Banners & Poster Collectives)

Type from Syrian Revolution Graphics: Brush & pen calligraphy
Hand-lettering
Colour from Syrian Revolution Graphics: Limited spot colours
Monochrome
Form from Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art: Folk & sacred symbols
Stylised figuration
Composition from Syrian Revolution Graphics: Single focal point
Isolated object
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 · Syrian Revolution Graphics

No!

Rakkas, standing in for Freely brushed Arabic calligraphy for one- or two-word slogans, composed for each poster rather than typed in a stock font; one member said he sometimes spent two days designing a single word such as 'freedom' or 'revolution', and that some pieces drew on Persian calligraphy (Al-Safir interview, 2012)

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 Syrian Revolution Graphics, with a counter-accent from Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art (Mohamed Mahmoud Murals) Syrian Revolution Graphics (Kafranbel Banners & Poster Collectives)

#f1ece0 ground · 36%
#151515 ink · 14%
#c8102e accent · 18%
#e0912f accent · 14%
#007a3d accent · 10%
#2b4c9b accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f1ece0;
  --ink: #151515;
  --accent-1: #c8102e;
  --accent-2: #e0912f;
  --accent-3: #007a3d;
  --accent-4: #2b4c9b;
  --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.

Syrian Revolution Graphics (Kafranbel Banners & Poster Collectives): These graphics come from an uprising met with massacres, sieges, detention and disappearance, and their makers worked under pseudonyms at real risk: Raed Fares and Hamoud Junaid were shot dead in Kafranbel on 23 November 2018 (local activists blamed Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which did not claim it), and the collective signed only with its own name, so never attribute a poster to an individual member or expose anyone who made this work. The martyr, siege, bread and Hama motifs refer to real massacres and real dead, not to an edgy 'war poster' look. The collective's posters were released under Creative Commons BY-NC, so do not use them or close pastiches commercially, and credit the collective, Kafranbel and the Creative Memory archive. The three-star flag has been the state flag since the HTS-dominated caretaker government took it up after Assad's fall, so using it, or Kafranbel's banners, as generic 'Syria' branding can imply an alignment their makers never gave. Have every Arabic line read by a fluent reader, never fill a design with pseudo-Arabic, do not mock the broken English of some banners, which was written to be understood abroad, and never present a generated image as a work of the uprising.

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 black-and-cream image of a child reaching toward a green flying dove appears beneath large red Arabic brush lettering. Ruined buildings and rubble stretch along the lower right against a textured cream background.

2011–2024 · Middle East & North Africa Syrian Revolution Graphics (Kafranbel Banners & Poster Collectives) Protest graphics of the Syrian uprising from 2011, made to be photographed and shared online rather than to last on a wall. In Kafranbel, a town in Idlib, calligraphers lettered Raed Fares's weekly slogans on white cloth in Arabic and often in English for audiences abroad, beside Ahmad Jalal's dark cartoons that parodied Western films and album covers. The anonymous collective The Syrian People Know Their Way posted posters for activists to print: one figure in halftone, silhouette or loose outline under a brushed Arabic slogan, answering the Assad cult's monolithic iconography.

More combinations

With Egyptian Revolutionary Street Art

With Syrian Revolution Graphics

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