After having the very fortunate experience of a trip to Dubai last month to visit our client – Arabian Travel Market, it lead to a unique perspective on the branding challenges the region offers.
The biggest challenge, it seems, is the range of typefaces available to translate the same level of contemporary or traditional/established values a brand captures.
Take Rolex for example. For me, this fails remarkably on face value. It's very difficult to gauge what is perceived as a luxury or established typeface in arabic, but the chosen script face does not convey the brand values of Rolex for me.
The identities that tend to work the best are specifically crafted for a particular brand and then translated again for the foreign market. Fanta works very well. A direct translation of the fun, forward thinking brand.
Brands that rely on a twist within the typography face an even greater challenge. Luckily the FedEx logo still manages to retain the hidden bonus within, pointing instead to the left, the direction of reading. Even though I know what the logo means, the arrow seems more obvious. Possibly because the surrounding text has no direct meaning to me. Nice work.
1 comment:
was searching for the arabic fedex logo since i noticed it before and came across your post. i am an arabic speaker.
i was also glad to see that they retained the negative space arrow in the fedex logo, but very disappointed with how it came out. the arrow is very clumsily placed, and has none of the subtlety of the English logo. I think their problem was trying to retain the nice big blockiness of the english type in the logo in the arabic -- if they had given up on that aspect, they could have easily twirked the letter shapes enough to hide the arrow away. i would call it a fail.
my favorite logo-gone-arabic is that of 7-up -- they did a great job preserving the shape of the english logo while maintaining readability and coolness from an Arabic perspective.
for the interested, check out this great blog about arabic type design: http://29letters.wordpress.com/
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