2026     
Los Angeles, CA

Ink, paper, and Adobe Illustrator

Ampersound creates audiovisual non-fiction stories with a particular emphasis on the power of sound. Founded by George Lavender, the company develops all of its material by collaborating with actual human creatives, a quality that became central to the identity.

A custom hand-drawn logoform was therefore created using ink and brush, giving it a human character that a typeset wordmark would lack. At its heart is an unavoidable but useful visual pun: the ampersand is woven directly into the form, while the overall lettering evokes the movement and vibration of a soundwave.

A single continuous line might have been the most literal way to express a soundwave moving forward, but it also risked sacrificing legibility. Rather than commit to fully cursive lettering, the logo uses a considered combination of connected and disconnected letterforms. The result retains the fluidity and rhythm of script while allowing each character to remain recognizable.

The forms flow into one another without becoming a single uninterrupted stroke, much like Ampersound itself: human voices, ideas and stories connected through sound, but each retaining its own distinct character.

2025.07
Cairo, EG + Helsinki, FI

Adobe Photoshop + Inkjet Print + Photography

Album art created for a song by Ramy Essam.

2025.08
Cairo, Egypt

Adobe Illustrator + Photoshop + Inkjet Print + Photography

When it came to branding this up and coming Youtube channel spearheaded by Marwan Imam—the name of which roughly translates to “The Ministry of Amusement & Artistic Affairs“ — the idea began with a simple cultural truth: in Egypt, lebb (sunflower seeds) are synonymous with leisure and entertainment—much like popcorn in America. The act of cracking lebb shells is practically shorthand for “passing the time.” Marwan was sure he wanted to relate the brand with lebb.

But while lebb is perfect as a concept, its aesthetics don’t easily translate into a strong or recognizable logo. Instead, the focus shifted to the “Wezara” (Ministry) part of the name, which doubles as the channel’s YouTube handle: @ElWezara. Enter the eagle—an emblem of institutional authority the world over. Except here, the eagle laughs. Rendered in a cartoonish style, it injects humor and playfulness, highlighting both tasliya (amusement) and tafnin (artistry).

The lebb hasn’t been forgotten. Rather than forcing it into a difficult-to-discern icon, it appears in photographs for the channel’s banner—spilling out of a paper cone (’ortas) across a flyer-like print. Its visual language borrows cues from the graphic aesthetic typically associated with traditional nut and snack shops in Egypt, cementing the cultural link between “entertainment” and “lebb.”

Finally, in a tongue-in-cheek nod to bureaucratic inefficiency, the branding embraces inconsistency: the logo never appears quite the same way twice, often mimicking the quirks of erroneous printing. It’s a deliberate touch of “ministerial incompetence” that seals the brand’s sly sense of humor.

2024.10 + 2025.06
Houston, TX + Boston, MA

Ink + Photoshop

Album art for El Ärkitekt’s new album, BOOSALEH. Twelve images correspond to the album’s twelve tracks. When the images are stacked together in a 3x4 grid, the form one unified design that serves as poster art to promote the album’s release.

When El Ärkitekt approached me, he knew he wanted an image of Handhala holding a compass. Handhala of course being a recurring character in the political cartoons of famed Palestinian cartoonist Naji Al-Ali. The iconic character grew to become deeply associated with Palestinian struggle, itself being a core impetus behind El Ärkitekt’s new album. 

The album is available to stream on Youtube, Spotify,  Apple Music, Anghami, and Tidal.

2024.09     
Houston, TX

Ink, paper, and Adobe Illustrator

Aside from the obvious eye, the logo is also comprised of 3 letterforms (as was the previous one), G, J and the Arabic letter ج. The G being the first letter in Ganzeer of course, as the ج is in جنزير (Ganzeer in Arabic). The thing about the letter ج though is that it is only pronounced a hard G in Egypt and pronounced J in literally every other Arabic dialect. Which means جنزير will often be pronounced Janzeer when I'm in touch with Arabic speaks who hail from not Egypt, so the logo is able to represent all possible phonetics in one single symbol. It's as complex as it is simple.

The eye may be a cliche, but fact of the matter is everything I do—be it art, design, or writing—stems from one unshakable trait: observation. Keen, unwavering observation. Without which I doubt I'd ever have anything worthwhile to say. In any medium, really.

I've always been a fan of the kind of symbols you can't help but want to scrawl on your desk when you're a kid, and I think this logo has an element of that.  

The earliest Ganzeer logos I conjured up tended to feature some graphic representation of a chain, because that’s what جنزير actually translates to. So it may seem to some to be a rather curious choice to not represent the chain at all in the latest brand iteration, but I’d like to think that as far as the word “Ganzeer” relates to me, it no longer carries any of its associations with the word chain, and has simply become a name associated with a person who engages in art design and storytelling.

Utilizing my signature together with the logo-form started to feel like a no brainer. Picasso’s signature was very much a part of his brand, as was Andy Warhol’s, as is the case with most visual artists. Why resist it? 

Aside from the main dot com, there are three core channels of online activity that each needed a different enough logoform to signal it as its own thing, while still remaining very much related to the Ganzeer “identity”, and so an additional letterform was incorporated into each along the same parameters that informed the original composite glyph. An extra “t” for the Ganzeer.Today blog, an “r” for Ganzeer.Reviews, and a “G” for the Garage.Ganzeer webshop.