Backbone Blog, Stories, News, Courses, Tutorials, Resources, and everything design.
Latest · Craft Three names that built modern Arabic design before it had a name. A broken typewriter, a bilingual sign, a book cover, three people solving specific problems built a discipline nobody had named yet.
By Fawaz AlAliwat · 1 October 2026 Read → → The history of Arabic typography, from the reed pen to the screen. From Ibn Muqla's tenth-century proportion system to a Lebanese architect patenting Unified Arabic in 1950, what Arabic script had to become to survive a machine. Fawaz AlAliwat 28 Sept 2026 → From the Founder Twenty-five years behind the decks taught me more about branding than design school did. A DJ set and a brand identity are solving the same problem from different angles. Fawaz AlAliwat 25 Sept 2026 → What actually happens in a Diagnose call. The gap gets named here, before anyone spends money building on top of it. Fawaz AlAliwat 22 Sept 2026 → Why we don't say AI. We use the tools. We don't lead with them, and the reason is worth explaining properly. Fawaz AlAliwat 19 Sept 2026 → Designing in two directions at once. Almost nobody talks about bilingual design properly, and it shows. Real heritage isn't a mood board reference, it's a decision made before anyone opens a file. Fawaz AlAliwat 16 Sept 2026 → The market got technical. We didn't. There's real, serious work happening in branding across the GCC region. There's also a lot of it built on rushed timelines and no direction. Here's the difference. Fawaz AlAliwat 13 Sept 2026 → New studio, old name. Before it had a website, a logo, or a single client, Qiwam had one word. Here's why nothing else was going to work. Fawaz AlAliwat 10 Sept 2026 
