Ganzeer Rebrand
Graphics
2024—09
Houston, TX
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.
Houston Zine Fest Poster 2024
Other, Graphics
2024—08
Houston, TX
Houston, TX
Mixed Media + Photography
Poster design for the 2024 edition of Zine Fest Houston, the theme of which was Zine-topia, Dystopia.
Yes, that is an actual photograph of actual objects laid out on a table, no trickery involved.
The Cure
Graphics, Object, Other
2024—06
Houston, TX + Los Angeles, LA + Seattle, WA
Houston, TX + Los Angeles, LA + Seattle, WA
In celebration of ten years since the release of THE CURE, a single by musician, collaborator, and dear friend N Vs. A (AKA N Slash A), I was asked to create new cover-art for the song’s re-release.
I knew by virtue of the song’s title alone, I wanted to incorporate something from the visual language of the medical/pharmaceutical field. But the idea was to combine it with something else, something unexpected. The song’s lyrics “ The children chanting, What have you done with our tomorrow. We won't listen any more, we are searching for the cure” inspired the image of the aerosol, an obvious tool of choice for any young person to take their objection to the streets. The thing is though, I’ve seen a lot of really dumb graffiti and street-art in my day, so I know the aerosol in and of itself is not enough of an indicator of sound objection. It needed something else, and thus came the idea of covering the can in brain matter.
My initial inclination was to draw the entire thing, but seeing as I had a bunch of spraypaint lying around the studio anyway, I thought: Why draw a can when I can draw (or paint rather) on a can?
And thus a physical object was created and photographed to create this cover art.
I knew by virtue of the song’s title alone, I wanted to incorporate something from the visual language of the medical/pharmaceutical field. But the idea was to combine it with something else, something unexpected. The song’s lyrics “ The children chanting, What have you done with our tomorrow. We won't listen any more, we are searching for the cure” inspired the image of the aerosol, an obvious tool of choice for any young person to take their objection to the streets. The thing is though, I’ve seen a lot of really dumb graffiti and street-art in my day, so I know the aerosol in and of itself is not enough of an indicator of sound objection. It needed something else, and thus came the idea of covering the can in brain matter.
My initial inclination was to draw the entire thing, but seeing as I had a bunch of spraypaint lying around the studio anyway, I thought: Why draw a can when I can draw (or paint rather) on a can?
And thus a physical object was created and photographed to create this cover art.
Here & Everywhere Brand Design
Graphics
2023—12
Houston, TX + New York, NY
Houston, TX + New York, NY
#RiskandRebellion Poster
Graphics
2021—01
Houston, TX + Helsinki, FI
Houston, TX + Helsinki, FI
Poster design and visual identity for #RISKandREBELLION a virtual event with nodes across the world, organized by Artists at Risk.