While in my job with the United Nations Development Programme, Iraq Country Office, I had the opportunity to directly design and participate in the design of various publications including Office branded folders, fact sheets, and complete reports of more than 300 pages.
My role when working in UNDP Iraq was much beyond the activity of designing the print jobs I mentioned. I managed the development projects for which these publications were meant to serve, and the printed material only represented a fraction of the whole service package that I delivered.
In several instances, I only directed the design of the publications. However, towards the end of my service in UNDP, I was given the opportunity to completely design the reports for the projects managed by the Crisis Recovery team in the office. The manuscript and photography were put together by the team and shared with me to synthesize the raw material into a finished report that was shared by the stakeholders.
The consumer base of these reports was mostly English-speaking. It was easy to put together the typeface bouquet for the design following the typographic standards set by the Organization. No such standards were formulated for publications in Arabic by the Organization, and I so I tried out several schemes.
For the report cover titles, I used Linotype Meriam designed by the Lebanese type designer, Ismat Chanbour. For chapter and section titles I chose a typeface designed by Mohammed Hassan from Mauritania. The typeface was called Lebanon and it had a bold and solemn style which was very suitable for the job. The body text was laid out using the default typeface that comes with the Adobe suite, Adobe Arabic design by Tim Holloway, a British Designer with a long experience in working with Arabic type.
