If Shehrazad Drew; Critical Writings on Arab Comic
Description
"If Shehrazad Drew: Critical Writings on Arab Comics" is a bilingual Arabic/English book offering a historic/critical exploration of Arab comics within the broader political, social, and economic context of the region.
The cover and chapter openers feature custom bold Arabic lettering inspired by the Ruq'a script prevalent in archival Arab comics capturing the essence of Arab vernacular language. The cover title lettering is surrounded by cloud-like forms, reminiscent of speech bubbles and Arabic calligraphic traditions.
The layout design addresses the challenge of the opposing reading directions of Arabic and English, right to left and left to right, by placing the Arabic text on the right and English on the left in each spread, while keeping one reading direction throughout. The single column body text utilizes paragraph separators in cyan made of items taken from the featured artworks to replace traditional paragraph spacing while ensuring a seamless visual and textual flow.
