Art Director & ACD. Nine years connecting identity, campaigns, production, product and experience under one vision.
Download CVMost designers start with how. I start with why.
The first thing I look for is not what a brand looks like — it's what's missing. The gap between what the business is and what the market sees. That gap is the work, whether the answer turns out to be an identity, a campaign, a film, a product or an event.
I came from commerce, not art school, so the business comes before the design. I taught myself the craft, which means I never learned what was supposed to work — only what actually did. And I never stop at the logo, because a brand that lives only in a file is a promise waiting to be kept.
Questions, not sketches.
Every brand has one belief, one tension, one truth the market hasn't seen yet.
Not a mood board — a decision about how this brand speaks, moves and behaves.
A logo is not a brand and a key visual is not a campaign.
Nothing is finished when the guidelines are.
Where Craft Became Instinct The journey started with the work itself.
Where Execution Became Direction At 199X, the role shifted from making individual pieces to directing complete visual narratives, leading creative teams and developing campaigns for major regional and international brands.
Where Direction Became Leadership Working across Saudi Arabia and the UAE moved the role into regional creative leadership.
Where Leadership Became Ownership Marllex Studios was built when freelance volume outgrew what one person could deliver.
Global brands, national programmes and government institutions — directly, through the studios he has led inside, and as a freelance art director.
Engagements include direct client work, agency and studio collaborations, and freelance assignments. Full credits sit with each project.
Ten countries. Three continents. One standard of craft.
National programmes, cultural bodies and commercial brands at full scale.
Government communications and institutional brand systems.
Where the practice started — nine years of campaign and identity work.
Brand creation for Hayah, work for Domino’s Pizza, and 12+ campaigns across multiple brands.
Campaign art direction through Ogilvy USA, and brand work for US clients.
Brand and campaign collaborations with international teams.
European campaign and identity collaborations.
Design and production collaborations.
Brand and campaign collaborations.
Identity work with international partners.
Regional campaign and identity work.
In Saudi Arabia craft is not a product — it is memory made tangible. A complete identity and CI manual: logo system, a thirteen-colour palette, typography, iconography, illustration, textures and full event applications from kiosks to merchandising. Heritage is not something you preserve behind glass; it is something you hand to the future, still warm from the maker's hands.
Most directions on the table were chasing energy: speed, spectacle, motion. But the audience that defines this category — serious collectors, auction houses, family-office buyers — is not impressed by volume. The direction was approved, and the city stopped hosting the event: it became it. In this category the loudest brand always loses; the quietest one belongs.
WATHB — the leap. One Arabic word charged with movement and the will to go before the path appears. The mark came from wild mountain animals at the peak of a leap; the colours were pulled straight out of the terrain — desert gold, ember orange, resilient green, mountain black. Seventy percent of Saudi Arabia has never been explored: that was not a statistic, it was a positioning waiting to be claimed. Explore the Unseen.
The two cultures were never far apart — an empire, a cuisine, a faith, and a way of receiving guests that treats the kitchen as the most important room in the house. The same tea glass in Istanbul and in Cairo. A complete cookware and glassware identity, from packaging and stationery to digital and signage. Two cultures, one kitchen. Not a fusion — a reunion.
Nomaede — the nomad, reimagined. The category sold places; the name sold a way of moving through the world. A heraldic cheetah crest with multiple lockups, a concierge-coded seal language, a landscape-drawn colour system and a three-register typographic voice, applied from stationery to magazine, folder, UI and events. The cheetah doesn't run to be seen running. Luxury is not where you go — it is who you are when you return.
Surge — the moment a machine breaks from rest into full force, the spike on the dyno graph. A speed-cut wordmark, an op-art warp system, a five-colour charged palette and Basic Sans typography, built as the modern, youthful counterpart to Monarch's institutional restraint. Same event, same brief, two answers: one quiet enough to belong, one loud enough to be felt the moment it arrives.
The audit wrote its own sentence: this place is the artists' portal to the world. The logo had always been read as a hangar, a roof remembering its industrial past: one mark, one idea, and an entire system: story, architecture, assets, and motion. JAX didn't get a facelift; it got an end to the dispersion. The hangar stopped being a roof over the art and became the doorway the world walks through to reach it.
Architecture is not decoration — it is structure that creates freedom. The process began with extraction, not sketching: a single geometric unit built on a precise grid, from which patterns, layouts and every touchpoint were generated. The logo became a generator. A system that scales from a business card to a building facade without losing its logic.
Every design begins with a blank white space — pure, overwhelming potential, which is another word for chaos. The grid is what organises it. A Bodoni wordmark with a shape language generated from its own geometry, the Manifesto Red palette, a postage-and-manuscript visual world and an editorial layout grid. Structure for the chaos. Soul for the machine.
Keek is the sound of a camera click — the decisive instant, the director's eye finding the angle nobody else would. A production house identity that solved the trust problem not by looking safe, but by looking so confident it became impossible to doubt. The ordinary eye sees a scene; a director sees a story.
We started before the logo — at the name. "The Private Office" borrows the language of family offices and private banking, but says it with the discretion of a members-only world. Four logo systems, a restrained colour and typography language and a suite of premium tactile applications took a government line item and made it a brand the world's wealthiest families would want to belong to. Before the oil, there were pearls.
The answer was hiding in the veins of a mulberry leaf — the leaf that feeds the silkworm, the origin of silk itself. Nothing about it is loud; everything about it is precise. A full brand book for a luxury abaya house: persona, archetype, voice, colour philosophy, packaging and launch plan. While competitors compete on embellishment, D'Eliganza competes on the confidence to say less, perfectly.
Finance is not about money — it is about direction: capital moving forward with intention. The answer was inside the name: the stroke, one diagonal cut into the heart of the wordmark. Unveiled at one of the world's most significant financial gatherings, in front of the leading figures of global finance and technology, and it held the room. Capital doesn't follow noise. It follows direction.
A custom suit is not a purchase, it is a decision. The X in Executive was cut to carry the silhouette of a formal jacket — sharp shoulders, structured lines. A calm, confident teal moved the brand away from every menswear cliché. The tagline said the rest in four words: Sharp as Your Silence.
Nature is not one green. Look at a single landscape mid-season — the warmth of the sun, the fire of the earth, the clarity of water, the freshness of new growth — and it reveals its whole spectrum. A grid-built monogram, a five-colour nature-spectrum palette and a bilingual geometric system. Not another green logo asking the world to feel guilty, but a youth alliance with the optimism to say: go ahead.
The answer was in the name. Not "The Agency", not "The Studio" — The Narrative, a name that quietly renames the entire job. An event is not an event, it is a chapter. A logo and symbol system generated from a modular grid, a serif-and-grotesque voice, a disciplined black–blue–grey palette, and applications from stationery to exhibition booth and brand magazine. A moment is spent the day it happens; a narrative grows stronger the longer it lives.
Media, Entertainment, Gaming and Sports are not four parallel businesses — they are four faces of one economy: the attention economy. A football fan, a Netflix subscriber, an esports player, a film viewer: same person, different rooms. A wordmark, a diagonal-slash device, an institutional palette and a full suite from programme materials to investor decks and environmental design. Four worlds were already in one word.
The name had already done the strategy: shift one letter and the Middle East becomes the Middle Feast — a region renamed after the thing it does best. A complete identity built for appetite and built to scale. It doesn't enter the market as another shawarma spot; it enters as what the category never had — a Middle Eastern food brand with the confidence of the global chains and a personality they could never copy.
The contradiction was the brand: the future of protein is both organic and engineered — biology turned into infrastructure. The identity refused the false choice between "natural" aesthetics and "tech" aesthetics. A Bio-Wave gradient device, an institutional typographic stack and a scientific-editorial photography direction. The future of food isn't a vegetable, it's a supply chain — and the brand had to look like both.
Not many companies — many horizons, one vision. The breadth was never scattered services; it was a single frequency expanding. A cymatics-built logo, the Horizon Glow gradient system, a warm terracotta-and-black palette and bilingual Archivo and Tajawal typography. The one thing the multi-sector category almost never earns: a single ownable idea that makes breadth look like vision instead of scatter.
Numou is the Arabic word for growth. Not finance, not lending, not debt: growth. A bilingual wordmark, an ascending chevron device, a trust-and-momentum palette of royal blue, navy and digital green, a rising-bar pattern system and a co-branding framework with Hub71. It turns the slow, fragmented hunt for capital into a single rising moment where the market competes for you.
The name held the answer: Creatives. A school that calls itself creative cannot present itself with a rigid crest-and-tie identity — the brand has to behave the way it wants its students to think. A monogram, a geometric pattern language, conceptual key visuals and applications from Early Learning to High School. Knowledge, built one shape at a time.
Most designers start with how. I start with why.
Strategy and design are the same act — thinking visually about a business problem. When a project arrives, the first thing I look for is not what it looks like. It's what's missing: the gap between what the business is and what the market sees. That gap is where the work lives, and the method holds whether the answer turns out to be an identity, a campaign, a film, a product or an event.
Questions, not sketches. Who is this talking to? What should it make people feel? What does the market already believe, and what has to change?
Every brand has one belief, one tension, one truth the market hasn't seen yet. Finding it is the job. Everything after it is translation.
Not a mood board — a decision about how this brand speaks, moves and behaves. Colour and type come after the character is settled.
A logo is not a brand and a key visual is not a campaign. I design the whole, so every part carries the same idea.
Nothing is finished when the guidelines are. It's finished when it breathes — on packaging, on screens, on walls, in motion.
I position the brand before I design it.
Every element serves the whole. Nothing decorative.
The same brand reads differently in Cairo, Riyadh and New York.
Identity, campaign, digital, production — until it stands on its own.
Strategy · Positioning · Naming · Identity · Guidelines · Rollout
Big idea · Key visuals · Content systems · Multi-channel rollout
Concepts · Treatments · Film direction · Motion · Branded content
Websites · Apps · UI/UX direction · Design systems · Packaging
Event identity · Audience journey · Spatial identity · Stage content
Creative direction consulting · Team leadership · Brand audits
A brand isn't born when you see it. It's born when you feel it.
I came from commerce, not art school — so the business comes before the design. I taught myself the craft, which means I never learned what was supposed to work, only what actually did. And I never stopped at the logo, because a brand that only lives in a file is a promise waiting to be kept.
Where Craft Became Instinct
The journey started with the work itself. Across Traffic Media, Engaz, Big Move, and ON Creation, I moved through graphic design, advertising, social, print, and brand execution, gradually progressing from Designer to Senior Designer and into Art Direction. Those years built the foundation: understanding composition, production, typography, campaign systems, and, more importantly, how an idea survives from the first sketch to the final output.
Where Execution Became Direction
At 199X, the role shifted from making individual pieces to directing complete visual narratives, leading creative teams and developing campaigns for major regional and international brands. The next chapter at Nasher expanded that responsibility into the Saudi market, working across government, national, and commercial programs while directing brand systems, campaigns, and multidisciplinary creative teams. This was where the work stopped being only about how something looked and became increasingly about why it existed, how it worked, and how an entire team could deliver it consistently.
Where Direction Became Leadership
Working across Saudi Arabia and the UAE moved the role into regional creative leadership. Collaborations with Manifest and Master Mind expanded the scope across campaigns, destinations, government and institutional work. At The Grid Studio in Abu Dhabi, the role developed from Art Director into Associate Creative Director, with responsibility extending beyond individual projects into teams, systems and creative departments. The work covered brand, campaign, product, digital experience and production, including programs connected to ADGM, ADIO, Hub71 and major government and national initiatives across the region. By this stage, the job was no longer simply to direct design. It was to build the environment in which strong creative work could happen repeatedly.
Where Leadership Became Ownership
Marllex Studios was built when freelance volume outgrew what one person could deliver. The practice brings strategy, identity, campaigns, product, production, and experience under one creative direction, assembling the right collaborators around each project while maintaining a single standard of thinking and execution. One of its early direct wins was Red Bull: a direct pitch won and delivered as a billboard campaign.
Several entries are concurrent collaborations, contracts or freelance assignments rather than consecutive full-time roles.
Global brands, national programmes and government institutions — directly, through the studios he has led inside, and as a freelance art director.
Engagements include direct client work, agency and studio collaborations, and freelance assignments. Full credits sit with each project.
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Based between Cairo, Riyadh and Dubai. Working across the Middle East, Europe, the United States and the rest of the world.
