Rizo Masr’s 2026 Ramadan Emsakeya (إمساكية رمضان) is a foldable A3 Riso-printed monthly tracker. It contains prayer timings, duaas, athkar reminders and habit trackers for the Islamic holy month. The foldable format allows the user to use it as both a practical printable and also a visual asset when it opens showcasing photographs of Cairo Ramadan street decorations and lanterns printed in duotone.

Tribute poster for Umm Kulthum, using 29LT Idris Flat. From Wikipedia:

Umm Kulthum (Arabic: أم كلثوم; c. 4 May 1904 – 3 February 1975) was an Egyptian singer and film actress active from the 1920s to the 1970s. She was given the honorific title Kawkab el-Sharq (Arabic: كوكب الشرق, lit. ‘Star of the Orient’). Immensely popular throughout the Middle East and beyond, Umm Kulthum is a national icon in her native Egypt; she has been dubbed “The Voice of Egypt” and “Egypt’s Fourth Pyramid”. In 2023, Rolling Stone ranked Umm Kulthum at number 61 on its list of the 200 Greatest Singers of All Time.

Her funeral in 1975 drew a crowd of over 4 million people, the largest human gathering in Egypt's history, even surpassing that of president Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Slanted magazine #46, “Cairo”, is a visual journey into the vibrant heart of Egypt’s creative scene. The dynamic design culture of Cairo – and beyond – reveals just how diverse, innovative, and powerful creative voices in Egypt are today.

From graphic design, typography, and visual communication to architecture and product design, Slanted #46 showcases outstanding projects that are shaping the cultural present and future of the region. Whether through progressive branding concepts, experimental approaches, or striking visual storytelling, this issue reflects the powerful creative energy flowing through Egypt. Slanted gives space to designers, illustrators, and artists from Cairo, other Egyptian cities, and abroad—highlighting their work and personal statements. In-depth essays and articles on cultural, social, and creative topics related to Cairo and Egypt round out the issue.

Slanted #46 is a compelling portrait of a design scene in motion—bold, diverse, and brimming with fresh perspectives. On our trip to Cairo, we conducted numerous interviews with people from the creative industries, which have been edited into the short film Cairo Unscripted—Exploring Cairo’s Past, Present, and Creative Future by design studio Ntsal. It is available for free from slanted.de/cairo.

To mark the release of Slanted #46, Slanted is launching a special edition with five stunning photo prints by Markus Lange, as well as a striking hoodie collaboration with Reell and Negmedine Khaled.

Herokid (W Type Foundry) is used across all communication for the Arabic Design Archive (ADA). Different variants of the typeface are applied on the website and social media to maintain visual consistency. It is also used in posters and other printed materials, reinforcing the archive’s identity across different contexts.

According to their website:

ADA is a non-profit initiative that seeks to enable knowledge production about Arabic design and its history through a framework of collecting, digitizing, and exhibiting. ADA aims to provide an open and accessible platform for the public to counter the parallel, inaccessible, and non-existent physical archive of the second half of the 20th century.

The Arabic typeface used in this application is yet unidentified.

Explore the world of houseplants with House Plants: A Simple Guide. This zine showcases ten easy-care plants, with simple tips for watering, sunlight, and propagation. Each plant comes with a delightful illustration that makes caring for it a breeze whether you’re just starting or already have a green thumb! The zine is accompanied by matching plant-themed cards.

The fonts in use are 29LT Okaso, 29LT Zarid Sans and 29LT Zawi, all by 29LT. Design by Maram Al Refaei with illustrations by Rana Samir. Photography by Fatima Hisham. Printed and published by Rizo Masr.

Omar Mobarek designed a vibrant visual identity for fitness influencer Malak El Ayouty’s latest training programme, Fit Like Malak. Malak develops a suitable training course for every body type she works with. To capture this aspect, the Cairo-based graphic designer approached the project by drawing a variety of figurines with a broad range of bodies in motion. The main figurine, which functions as the icon of Fit Like Malak, is shown in the fitness influencer’s favourite stance of the squat, shaping the first letter of her name (M).

The visual identity uses Omar’s illustrations in vibrant colours combined with the typefaces Farmacia and Kiosk by Nguyen Gobber, which are playfully mixed and even stretched or condensed to match the identity’s concept. Adieu by Good Type Foundry is used for further text.

Via Norman McKnight, who comments:

I bought this card because of the variety of type faces and languages, Armenian, Arabic & French.

The typeface used for the name in Latin letters and the French job title (“Négociant – Commissionnaire” – “Merchant – Commission agent”) is the light weight of a design that went under various names. The left-leaning advertising face originated at Wagner & Schmidt, a punchcutting company in Leipzig that sold matrices to numerous foundries. Those would then cast the designs and typically sell them under different names. In Germany, Stempel and also Ludwig Wagner and Weber carried both weights as Helvetia. Bauer had it as Favorit-Zirkular, Genzsch & Heyse as Caprice and John as Corona. In France, Beaudoire and Peignot & Fils sold it as Helvétiennes and Turlot as Batardes Renversées. In England, Stephenson Blake and Harrild & Sons offered the light weight under the name Engadine and the bold as (Reed’s) Waverley. For more names, see the typeface page.

The upright script used for the place name – “Alexandrie (Egypte)” – is a Ronde, probably of French origin. The specific version is unidentified. For similar fonts that are digitally available, see French 111 (a.k.a. Gando), ITC Redonda, Bon Mot NF, Typo Upright, and the linked related typefaces on those pages.

The Arabic and the open and shaded Armenian are likewise unidentified. If you have any insights into their names, please share in the comments.

Extracts from Volume 01 of Dataland Publications. Designer Mina Maurice comments:

Dataland is a bilingual publication aiming to shed light on the vast existing building stock within the city of Cairo and therefore showing its potential to be maintained and reused through an attempt at archiving data of the city’s built environment within curated categories of building typologies. Additionally providing a platform for visual and literary contributions by local researchers and visual practitioners.

Maurice is using 

TWK Lausanne (designed by Nizar Kazan and published by WELTKERN®) and ABC Favorit عربي Arabic (designed by Khajag Apelian and Wael Morcos and published by Dinamo). Art direction by Ahmed Morsi.

EIPICO is a pharmaceutical company located in Egypt. The package design of one of its medical products uses Nasser. The product’s name is سيتال in Arabic, or CETAL in English. Other texts on the package also using Nasser include:
معلق للشرب: يؤخذ عن طريق الفم (“oral suspension: to be taken orally”)
مسكِّن للألم وخافض للحرارة (“analgesic and antipyretic”)

باراسيتامول (Paracetamol) is set in 29LT Bukra. Other fonts used are Source Sans, Swissra, AXt Manal Black, and Helvetica.

Neue Power with Nexa in use for Zaha Clothing, in a design by Leo&Co Studio, who comment:

The word Zaha comes from an Arabic origin, meaning to build, create, and reflect love for helping others. They’re not just a clothing brand. They introduce a meaningful experience to give back to the community through donations, charity work, and lifelong contributions to make the world a better place.

We have worked on creating a modern, bold, flexible and dynamic identity. We created a brand capable of flexibly adapting to various and different media and changing needs at various levels, a friendly and vigorous brand that promises to make life better for its audience.

Posters and covers for Film My Design screenings at Cairo Design Week (FMDXCDW). In an Instagram post, designer Maram Al Refaei writes:

My inspiration drive for this identity was directly linked to the emotional waves, high and lows, thick and thins each film carried throughout an entire week of screenings. It was the order of screening that was interesting and helped me create imaginative graphs and wavelengths of different sensations.

For English/Latin text, Agrandir and Editorial New (both available from Pangram Pangram) are used in a mix of various weights and widths. On the festival poster, Arabic text is set in Lifta by Omaima Dajani. The Arabic typefaces used in social media images are yet to be identified.

Read more about this identity in an article on It’s Nice That.

Baked is the name of an American-inspired cookies and desserts company that operates in Cairo, Egypt. Baked was born in 2012 as a satellite kitchen and now is a widely spread brand of cookies, cakes, cupcakes, bread, and other wholesome desserts. Baked products are decadent and homemade. The brand has a retro-vintage style. It’s a ‘homemade indulgence’ with a caring, uncomplicated, trustworthy and welcoming character, and a homey, retro-vintage, handcrafted, wholesome look. It’s a very fun and talkative brand.

Libre Baskerville is based on American Type Founder’s Baskerville from 1941, which made it a great fit for a retro-American brand. Its taller x-height, wider counters, and a little less contrast allow it to work well for reading on-screen which is also perfect for a modern brand widely represented on the Internet. FTY Speedy Casual as an old-fashioned American-inspired typeface was a perfect choice as a companion for the legible and easy-readable serif. It paradoxically combines the relaxed feeling with a speedy look and could be a perfect choice for a product that you can use as a joyful indulgent snack without hurry but without slowdown as well. And finally, Jupiter was originally released by Filmotype in the late 1950s and definitely reminds the typefaces from American posters and advertisements of the 60s. It’s expressive, smooth, and has a charming personality which is wonderful to be added as a zest and touch of handmade.

Be Good Today is the line of delicious healthy products made from all-natural ingredients for the health-conscious individual, people on a limited diet due to illness, allergy, or lifestyle choice. At Be Good Today, they “believe that feeling good starts with eating good food”. The brand and its packaging should reflect a “mindful goodness” and have “good-natured, inspirational, caring, optimistic and ingenious character, with an artistic, unconventional, raw-coolness, wholesome look”.

I’ve found Goldplay to be the right choice for its rounded, soft terminals which give it a friendly and expressive look – it has a modern contemporary style, but classic proportions. The secondary typeface, DM Serif Text and DM Serif Display, was chosen to add a touch of elegance because of its delicate serifs and fine detailing. The logotype is custom drawn.

My Business Towards Success (original Arabic title: مشروعي نحو النجاح) is a guide about entrepreneurship authored by Farida Hamed and published by Dar Rosa, Qatar. The book was designed by Cairo-based designer Raghda Moataz using 29LT Zeyn and 29LT Zarid Text. From designer Raghda Moataz:

In order to create texture and warm feelings when experiencing this book, we used scraps of paper similar to that on which the author wrote down her ideas while writing the book and expanded them into more different textures with different formats and used it to design the “quotes” spreads.

Nardine Shenouda and her team at Ntsal Cairo developed the design direction for the Shasha Mobile Film Festival, a festival in Cairo, Egypt that was launched to celebrate the short films shot only using mobile phones. It created a space for young talents to compete, promote, expose, and challenge themselves amongst other filmmakers and storytellers.

The identity pairs the Arabic typeface Dobb by Heheh Type (available via Future Fonts) with Space Grotesk by Florian Karsten. The visual identity was created by Nada Sultan, and the digital experience executed by Yasmine Nagui & Lama Ahmed. Nardine Shenouda of Ntsal Cairo explains:

Our strategy for this project was to channel the innate rawness of filmmaking on a mobile phone into a visual identity and an iconic Arabic logo. So we went for a fresh, raw and flexible take on things through custom Arabic lettering, a candy palette, and heavy use of texture which was perfectly complemented by the heavily stylized Arabic typeface Dobb by Heheh type foundry, whose heavy weight provided the necessary contrast with our freeform elements and bright palette.

Two road signs – the small white and the big brown one – for the name of Blatso Garden in Al-Nozhah street, Shaikh Zayed City, Cairo. The signs are set in the Castile typeface, and show the English name of the company, Blatso Garden, in Arabic letters (بلاتسو جاردن). Blatso Garden Zayed is a big open place used for hosting wedding, engagement (courtship), and birthday parties and the like.

AUC Times is a student magazine published at the American University in Cairo. The latest issue, “A World Unplugged”, is a bilingual publication dealing with individual stories post-Covid-19 and the prospect of plugging/unplugging in both a literal and figurative sense.

We – 40MUSTAQEL – were commissioned to work on the editorial design. The font choices and their treatment were directed to reflect the issue’s theme; examining the correlation between isolation, mental health, tragedy and escapism in the digital age post COVID-19.

Designing the publication was inspired by the common theme of mankind versus technology and the ramifications of social media in a world plagued by a pandemic, with visuals of TV static, pixelated motifs and a visual narration of postmodern cyber culture.

City Edge Developments is “Egypt’s national leading real estate developer and development manager.” The ad for their Al-Maqsad (New Capital) project shown above uses Nasser for the words “attaslaim fee 2021” (“delivery in 2021”).

The City Edge Developments logo is based on Gotham. In the Al-Maqsad project logo, SangBleu OG Serif is paired with an unidentified Arabic typeface. The slogan (“The First Destination …”) uses an unidentified roman with wedge serifs.

A plastic bag of bread holds a yellow badge typed in Zawiya, a Kufic modern square-shaped Arabic typeface. The words in this badge read “Ramadan Kareem, 5+1 Bee 4 Jinaih” (Well Ramadan, 5+1 at 4 Pounds).

Another phrase in Arabic is set in another font and says “Lebanese bread”. The Latin typefaces used for English text include Cheltenham and Lobster.

Illuminated sign with Nasser for the name. The numerals on the LED sign are from Arial.

Bait Suqrat (بيت سقراط / House of Socrates) is a restaurant and café in 6th of October City near Cairo, Egypt. The restaurant’s orange board is designed using the Nasser font. In addition, the logo includes the subline “Lebanese meals” using Nasser.

The logo pairs lettering with a subline in Nasser and other unidentified Arabic typefaces.

Pizza box featuring Sarah Script for “Pizza”. The ticker uses Hobo.

Hacen Casablanca is used for the two words of “Mat’am waa Kafaih” (Restaurant and Café) at the right.