Stylogenyin the style of Syrian Revolution Graphics (Kafranbel Banners & Poster Collectives)

Counterculture · 2011–2024 · Middle East & North Africa

Syrian Revolution Graphics (Kafranbel Banners & Poster Collectives)

Also known as Syrian revolutionary art, Art of the Syrian uprising, Kafranbel banners, Alshaab Alsori Aref Tarekh posters, The Syrian People Know Their Way posters

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.

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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.
AI-generated by Stylogeny from the style’s design choices. Not a real or historical work.

Use it with care

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.

01

How it works

  • Make the work for the camera and the feed: letter a banner to be held up and photographed with the crowd, or design a poster as a file that activists download, print at home (in black and white when ink is dear) and carry; sign a banner with the town and the date and a poster with the collective's name, never with a person's name.
  • On a poster, let one short slogan in freely brushed Arabic calligraphy carry the sheet, such as al-hurriya ('freedom') or 'No fear after today', large against a single figure. On a banner, write a whole satirical sentence of three or four lines across a wide white cloth or board in marker capitals or upright print, in Arabic and in plain English for the world outside, with the headline or the punchline word in red, the body in black or blue, and a signature and date line at the foot ('15/7/2012 Occupied Kafranbel').
  • Show one figure, either a photograph cut out and pushed to halftone, high contrast or silhouette (a dead man lying on the ground for 'Martyr for Bread', a child and the Hama waterwheel in stencil silhouette for 'It will not happen again') or a loose brush or marker outline drawing (the bandaged boy with a slingshot for 'Baba Amr', a masked woman with her hands behind her head in white outline for 'I'm coming out to protest'), on a paper-toned, grunge-stained or black ground, sometimes cut across by a diagonal ochre band.
  • Keep to a few colours: black and red on off-white, an ochre or brown accent, the blue of a marker pen on Kafranbel's banners, and the green, white and black of the three-star independence flag that became the uprising's sign in late 2011.
  • Answer violence with satire and quotation: borrow a film poster, an album cover, a painting or a 'Black Friday special offer', and turn it on the regime, its foreign allies and the world's indifference.
  • Give the work away: refuse 'all rights reserved', release it for anyone to print and remake (the collective used Creative Commons BY-NC), and date each banner so it reads as that Friday's news.

Syria and its online networks from the uprising of March 2011. In Kafranbel (Kafr Nabl), a town in Idlib governorate, the media office run by Raed Fares (1972–2018) made banners every week for the Friday protest from April 2011: Fares wrote the words, local calligraphers lettered them on white cloth or board, Ahmad Jalal drew the cartoons, and the banners were photographed with the crowd and posted on the Facebook page 'Occupied Kafranbel Banners'. The anonymous collective Alshaab Alsori Aref Tarekh ('The Syrian People Know Their Way') began posting early in 2011, shortly after the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings (Syria Untold; Jadaliyya). It had about fifteen members inside Syria, in the occupied Golan, in Europe and in America, with no graphic designer among them, and they argued each poster out online before posting it (Jadaliyya, 2012), signing it only with the collective's name (Al-Safir interview, 2012). Street-art campaigns borrowed the stencil: artists behind Freedom Graffiti Week Syria put stencils of martyrs and slogans online to print, cut and spray, and the Kesh Malek group ran a 'Syria Banksy' initiative. The Facebook page 'Stamps of the Syrian Revolution' posted more than 400 mock postage stamps by mostly anonymous artists, one of them, from 2012, credited to Ammar al-Beik. The work is archived by Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution, led by the graphic designer Sana Yazigi from Beirut. Kafranbel's banners stopped after Fares's murder in November 2018 and the town's capture by government forces on 25 February 2020, while murals in opposition-held Idlib kept addressing the world, as in Kesh Malek's mural answering Roger Waters (Atlantic Council, 2019) and Aziz Asmar's mural of George Floyd with the words 'I can't breathe' on the remains of a bombed kitchen (TIME, 2020). The green-white-black, three-star independence flag of 1930 became the protest movement's sign in late 2011. The period ends with the fall of Assad in December 2024, when that flag became Syria's national flag (formally on 13 March 2025) and the uprising's imagery became state imagery

02

Its design choices

From Stylogeny’s vocabulary of design choices: defining choices make the style, characteristic ones are usual, occasional ones turn up now and then.

Layout & composition
Space & hierarchy
Typography
Colour
Form & shape
Surface & texture
Ornament
Imagery
Medium & production
Tone & intent
Avoids
Authoritative & institutional, Luxurious & glamorous, Abundant decoration, Full polychrome, Horror vacui, Gloss & highlights, Fluorescent & neon, Ornamented display

Palette

  • #f1ece0
  • #151515
  • #c8102e
  • #007a3d
  • #e0912f
  • #2b4c9b

Typefaces

  • 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)

  • Banner hand-lettering in marker and paint on white cloth or board

    Arabic lettered by local calligraphers, English in plain capitals or upright print, in black, red and blue, closed by a signature and date line such as 'Occupied Kafranbel'

  • A small calligraphic signature, 'al-shaab al-suri aref tariqu', at the foot of each poster in place of any individual's name

  • A bold digital Arabic typeface for some titles, as in 'It will not happen again'

Known for

  • Kafranbel banners for the town's weekly protests from April 2011

    written by Raed Fares and lettered by local calligraphers in Arabic and English (sometimes Russian), with cartoons by Ahmad Jalal that borrowed a Pink Floyd album cover, the Titanic poster and The Lord of the Rings; the first read 'Freedom arrived from the fingernails of the children of Daraa' (Foreign Policy, 2013)

  • Kafranbel, 'There is no egg in eggplant, no ham in hamburger. But let's face it, there is an Ass in Assad...!', hand-lettered in blue with 'Ass' picked out in red on white board, signed '15/7/2012 Occupied Kafranbel'

  • Kafranbel, 'Black Friday special offer' banner (28 November 2015)

    'Whoever, wherever you are, bring your enemy and come to fight in Syria for free (free land & free sky) limited time offer', a wide white cloth with a red capital headline, a black capital body and a red signature line, 'The Syrian Revolution – from Kafranbel 28 Nov 15', held across the crowd beside independence flags

  • Alshaab Alsori Aref Tarekh

    (The Syrian People Know Their Way), 'Martyr for Bread', on the government's sieges of Syrian towns, and 'Baba Amr', released after the killings in Baba Amr, Homs (dated December 2011 by the Atlantic Council), whose bandaged boy with a slingshot is a Syrian version of Zaytoun, the Little Refugee, the barefoot boy with a slingshot whom Mohamed Tayeb, a Palestinian refugee born in the Yarmouk camp in Damascus, created as a graffiti character in Berlin around 2010

  • Alshaab Alsori Aref Tarekh

    'It will not happen again', a child in stencil silhouette underlining the words beside a waterwheel, the landmark of Hama, and 'I'm coming out to protest', a masked woman in white outline on black, her hands behind her head, the speaker female to stress women's part in the revolution (Atlantic Council)

  • Alshaab Alsori Aref Tarekh posters in the British Museum, part of a group of 68 political posters acquired in 2016

    (registration 2016,6034) that were made digitally and shared on social media between 2011 and 2014, among them a silhouette of Obama's and Putin's faces sharing one tie on a red ground (2016,6034.61), shown in the display Living Histories (5 June – 22 October 2017)

  • Aram Tahhan and Ibrahim Fakhri, Freedom Graffiti Week Syria (2013, spray paint on canvas, 6 m × 140 cm), shown in Culture in Defiance

    Syria Speaks at Rich Mix, London (4–13 July 2013), a campaign whose stencils of martyrs and slogans were put online in high resolution to print, cut and spray

  • Mock postage stamps of the uprising's events and figures on the Facebook page 'Stamps of the Syrian Revolution', including a 2012 stamp credited to Ammar al-Beik

03

Make something in this style

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04

Where it comes from, and what it’s close to

Before it

The style it grew out of, and the styles it borrowed from.

This styleSyrian Revolution Graphics (Kafranbel Banners & Poster Collectives)2011–2024 · Middle East & North Africa

After it

The styles that grew out of it.

No later style in the atlas grew out of it yet.

Alike in its design choices

Styles that make many of the same choices, related or not, besides those above.

05

Sources

  1. Natasha Hall, 'The evolution of Syrian revolutionary art', Atlantic Council SyriaSource (5 August 2019) (https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/syriasource/the-evolution-of-syrian-revolutionary-art)
  2. 'البوستر السياسي السوري .. الكلمة في وجه الرصاصة' (The Syrian political poster: the word against the bullet), Jadaliyya (8 July 2012) (https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/26490)
  3. 'حوار مع الشعب السوري عارف طريقه' (Interview with The Syrian People Know Their Way), from Al-Safir, republished on the collective's blog (15 January 2012) (https://sha3b3aref.blogspot.com/2012/01/blog-post_15.html)
  4. Amal Hanano, 'Rising Up and Rising Down', Foreign Policy (18 October 2013) (https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/10/18/rising-up-and-rising-down)
  5. Lina Sergie Attar, 'Revolutionary Wit: In memory of Raed Fares, the satirist Syria needed', New Lines Magazine (22 November 2020) (https://newlinesmag.com/essays/revolutionary-wit)
  6. Oula A. Alrifai, 'In Memoriam: Raed Fares and the Banners of Kafranbel', Harvard Kennedy School Student Review (13 December 2018) (https://studentreview.hks.harvard.edu/in-memoriam-raed-fares-and-the-banners-of-kafranbel/)
  7. Wikipedia, 'Raed Fares (activist)' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raed_Fares_(activist)), 'Kafr Nabl' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kafr_Nabl) and 'Flag of Syria' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Syria)
  8. British Museum collection, Alshaab Alsori Aref Tarekh, posters 2016,6034 (https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/term/BIOG246525; https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/W_2016-6034-61); Arab British Centre, 'Living Histories – Recent Acquisitions of Works on Paper by Contemporary Arab Artists' (2017) (https://www.arabbritishcentre.org.uk/whatson/living-histories-recent-acquisitions-of-works-on-paper-by-contemporary-arab-artists/)
  9. Stroom Den Haag, 'Syrian Freedom Artists' (https://stroom.nl/en/stroom/agenda-en/syrian-freedom-artists)
  10. Nawara Mahfoud, 'Culture in Defiance: Syria Speaks', V&A blog (9 July 2013) (https://www.vam.ac.uk/blog/posters-stories-va-collection/culture-defiance-syria-speaks)
  11. Amira Gad, 'Culture In Defiance: Continuing Traditions of Satire, Art and the Struggle for Freedom in Syria', Ibraaz (22 August 2012) (https://archive.ibraaz.org/projects/29)
  12. Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution, author records 'The Syrian People Knows Its Way' and 'Kafranbel Banners' (https://creativememory.org/authors/the-syrian-people-knows-its-way/, https://creativememory.org/authors/kafranbel-banners/)
  13. Bridget Conley, 'Archiving Syria's Creative Memory — an interview with Sana Yazigi', World Peace Foundation (24 January 2020) (https://worldpeacefoundation.org/?p=2615)
  14. Malu Halasa, Zaher Omareen and Nawara Mahfoud (eds), Syria Speaks: Art and Culture from the Frontline (Saqi Books, London, 2014) (https://saqibooks.com/books/saqi/syria-speaks/)
  15. 'The Syrian People Know Their Way', Syria Untold (17 March 2014) (https://syriauntold.com/?p=8542)
  16. Tactical Technology Collective, 'Postage Stamps Document the Revolution', 10 tactics remixed (https://informationactivism.org/en/postage-stamps-document-revolution.html)
  17. Jehanne Bergé, 'In pictures: Uncovering the art from Syria's war', Middle East Eye (28 March 2019) (https://www.middleeasteye.net/gallery/pictures-the-art-of-syria-war-book-exhibition-creative-memory-of-the-syrian-revolution)
  18. Joseph Hincks, 'In Solidarity and as a Symbol of Global Injustices, a Syrian Artist Painted a Mural to George Floyd on a Bombed Idlib Building', TIME (6 June 2020) (https://time.com/5849444/george-floyd-mural-idlib-syria/)
  19. Mohamed Tayeb, 'Zaytoun, the Little Refugee', Tea After Twelve, issue 3 (fled Syria in 2009; created Zaytoun as a graffiti character in Berlin about a year later, a barefoot boy with a slingshot standing for himself as a Palestinian refugee from Yarmouk): https://www.tea-after-twelve.com/1/all-issues/issue-03/issue-03-overview/chapter2/zaytoun-the-little-refugee/index.html

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