Majid Al Futtaim is a holding company in Dubai with over 40,000 employees operating multiple business units including shopping malls, retail, and leisure establishments in 13 countries including the UAE, Lebanon, Egypt, Saudi Arabia.

Within their Leisure business unit, there is Global Snow, and the flagship Ski Dubai snow park. Our brief for Global Snow was summarised down to following statement: “Develop a signature brand experience that embodies Global Snow’s excitement, optimise the booking process, and boost customer retention.”

Matching their ambitious goals of opening more snow parks, we were tasked to build a dual language scalable digital experience that would work across multiple formats – web, kiosk, display, apps and more.

Working with a brand which was “waiting for a brand update” we decided to move forward with typography and set a standard for a communication hierarchy utilising the Druk family for headlines – in Heavy Italic, Wide Heavy Italic as well as Text Heavy Italic and Text Wide Super Italic styles – and Inter for all body copy. For the Arabic headlines, we commissioned 29LT for a customised version of 29LT Bukra Wide Black.

In Spring 2018 the Slanted editors took a close-up look at the contemporary design scene of Dubai. A city—when described by many people—that is all sickening shine and has no soul. But Dubai and the whole region, originally a piece of desert sparsely populated by bedouins, is now transforming itself rapidly into a center, if not the world’s greatest center, of trade, finance, and tourism—and moreover, something important happened in the last few years: Culture!

29LT Bukra is used for the wayfinding and interactive applications in the Etihad Museum in Dubai.

Visit Dubai:

Dubai is well-known for always looking towards the future, but a new museum in the emirate gives visitors a deeper look into the UAE’s past. Opened on January 7, 2017, the museum chronicles the era before the country’s founding, the agreement signing and subsequent declaration of the Union in 1971. The museum also provides insight and understanding of the UAE constitution and the rights and responsibilities of Emirati citizens. The building design was inspired by the shape of a manuscript, with seven columns symbolising the pens used to sign the Union agreement.

The January issue of Sky, the in-flight magazine of Delta Airlines, features a photo-essay on the remarkable Persian Gulf metropolis Dubai. Designer Ted Rossiter needed a feature typeface to accompany the striking photographs of Roberto Frankenberg. He turned to Ambicase Modern from Teeline Fonts, which I designed in 2010.

Ambicase Modern is a type design that grew out of a conceptual challenge: could both the traditional upper- and lowercase forms be merged into single glyphs for each letter of the alphabet? The consequent letterforms are, in some cases, rather strange.

Rossiter's choice of Ambicase Modern was a canny one. While Middle Eastern design played no role in the typeface's origin, the signature peculiarity of Ambicase Modern's letters can effectively signify cultural difference. (Interestingly, a Lebanese firm that takes inspiration from Arabic letterforms, Kashida, had previously also landed on Ambicase Modern for its logo.) Exoticism can thus be suggested without resorting to cheesy fonts that superficially emulate the visual features of Arabic calligraphy. And the hybrid nature of the ambicase concept fits the picture that we get of Dubai from Frankenberg's photographs: we see spice vendors, camels, and prayer rugs, but also skyscrapers and shopping malls.

Not only the choice but also the usage of Ambicase Modern is noteworthy in this photo-essay. This showy typeface is best in small doses, as here where it is employed for only nine words in the six-page feature. The longer pull-quotes and decks appear in ITC Officina Sans, the comfortable sobriety of which serves well as a foil. The designer has also been smartly selective in his use of Ambicase Modern's many swash glyphs, which add curlicue ornaments to the letters. The enormous letters used across the binding on the title spread might have been an opportunity to use the finer-detailed "Poster" cut of Ambicase Modern, but given that they are reversed out and given a gradient, the more substantial regular cut letters work well. Additional ornaments, mostly designed by Rossiter himself, take inspiration from Arabic culture and work with the typography to enliven the pages.

This poster had to be as Dutch as possible.