Artwork by TarekChemaly
In the GCC region every international brand that enters the market must have an Arabic version of its logo, and most of the time the rationale of the design eludes me. There are of course similarities between the Arabic and the original logo as it is done by professionals, but something always goes amiss, and as Borges said "the original is not faithful to the translation", but still - there are easier ways to keep the spirit of the original, one of the easiest I find is in the samples I have done above which depict the logos of Lego, Meccano, Matchbox and Hot Wheels in Arabic. It goes simply to taking either full letters of fragments of them from the original logo and reinterpreting them as Arabic letters. E for example makes a perfect inverted "waw" و in Arabic, X is just one half of "kaf" كـ and so on. So there, this is a small effort to sensibilize designers in the region on a better interpretation in Arabic of international material.