Isdar Mustaqel is an Arabic-English non-periodical paperback on design practices that is serious, critical and playful. Isdar aims to initiate discussions, develop ideas, continue conversations and experiment with designs that balance theory with practical experience, contributing to the development of a design discourse that engages communities on the margins of Western-centric design practices and conversations.

Language is the theme of the inaugural issue of Isdar. Language in all its forms is used as a lens through which to examine the practice of graphic design and typography and tackling issues such as sociolinguistics, pop culture, script/speech, mass media and more. The issue features several contributors from across the design and arts scene, who share their vivid and compelling take on what language means to them.

To design is to construct a world, whether it is a world to be projected onto a flickering screen or pressed onto the cellulose fibers of a sheet of paper to later be bound up into a book. It is to delight in artifice over the contingent arrangement of nature, how the designer pulls from the disparate realm of things to fashion a place coherent, incoherent, striking, calming in turns. Trees are replaced with vortices, color blocks, linearity, icon, figuration.

The burble of language on the street, in a home, among friends over sips of a hot drink takes the form of spatialized phonemes: a sentence made to carry sighs as punctuation or a glottal stops breaking a word with a ء. In this, we find the fascination that compelled Khaireddin el Zarakly to relinquish his gravitas. Enchanted by the colloquial vivacity of A Fetewwa’s Memoirs,  Zaraqli allowed it to guide him in relinquishing the rules of language.  Sometimes, these are worlds we want to share without limit, to bring others to sit, explore the thoughts and emotions of specific moment and time rendered concrete. Other times, we want our world to exist impenetrable by the prying eyes of authority.

But the places we construct in the things we design are never truly our own. They are haunted by the choices of designers, writers, technicians, scribes, illustrators, politicians who have come before us.

What is our task, then, as makers and consumers of artifice, is to ask: Why? Why are things this way? And then, we might ask: why can’t they be another?

It is with this questioning that we have invited writers and designers to populate the coming pages of the inaugural issue of Isdar Mustaqel, which specifically focuses on the intersection of design and language. We have no pretense to a definitive answer to any of the above. We approach the task with humility and curiosity and a realization that our answers might be unsatisfactory, but we hope, at least, that they are unsatisfactory in a satisfactory way.

In thinking about how this edition might resonate for those interested or practicing design proximate to Arabic speaking communities, we felt it important to understand what is encoded in the way language and writing is spatialized.

Why, for example, do the iterations of non-standard written Arabics that populate scribal traditions of the past not make their way into print? How does a single page create hierarchies of interpretation and meaning? How and why do writers attempt to bring dialects onto the written page? Can our design of script be a point of resistance? Can it open up other forms of literacy and knowledge sharing across different classes and peoples? Why do we learn to approach design in the way that we do and can we go beyond traditional trappings?

Across the various interventions in this volume, we hope to furnish you, our reader, with writings and visualizations that allow us to revisit glimpses of the past in new ways and equally put on the table potential new ways to think about what can make up a design practice.

Daniel O’Connell and Ahmed Wael