Nourhan Wahdan
Design Director - pew. design bureau
Egypt
30 AUGUST, 2024
It’s funny, and not a lot of people know this, but I originally planned on getting into medical school, I had the GPA and the scholarship for it too! I could have saved my parents a lot of money, but I have my dad to thank for that. He was the first to notice my “artistic talents” all over the walls of our house when I was about 5 years old.
As a child of the 90s, I was captivated by the early days internet forums, it's where I really started getting into my graphic design work and being able to turn my video games fan art into posters, banners, and book covers for my online community and I loved being part of that small pocket of the internet.
Come 2011, and to graphic design school I went. At the German University in Cairo is where I learnt the fundamentals of graphic design and how I’ve come to turn everything I’ve been practicing since the age of 5 into a career.
I want to say it's when we start crafting our brand concept and narrative for a client's brief, but honestly, I'll always love that moment after we're done presenting the earliest visual presentation to our clients/partners and I'll see that first glimmer of excitement on their faces, and after we're done when everyone; our team and theirs, start discussing all the possibilities that could come next. That energy in the room is why I love doing what I do.
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"Prioritising aesthetics over strategy".
One thing I always tend to notice is that the industry gets hung up on latest visual trends and aesthetics. The point of a branding venture is to have longevity, a foundation that can be built on for years, ever flexible and evolvable. Ultimately, taste or form don’t matter if clear business goals and audience insights are overlooked or not properly taken into account.
I think the most challenging decision was to start our own thing. My partner and I founded pew. design bureau back in 2017, at a young age with only a few years of work experience. However, our creative process has proven to be a market favourite!
The market unfortunately relies on the "everything-agency" model, which ultimately comes at the expense of proper brand building. We’ve seen firsthand how other agencies can get caught up in surface-level solutions or strategies that don't fully address the underlying objectives of building a brand. We have been successfully challenging the status quo of the creative vs. client adage through our collaborative, yet expertise-led, strategic approach.
Easily our brand work for SOKNA, Egypt’s first end-to-end funeral service. The service itself was unheard of in Egypt, so when we got the brief, there was no way we'd turn it down.
The name was already there, Sokna in Arabic meant "peacefulness", so we started from there. SOKNA believes that no matter the belief system, everyone deserves a timeout of absolute peace, clarity and possible transcendence when they’ve lost a loved one. Multiple religious and non-religious philosophies have interpreted death as the mere separation of body & soul. So we’ve mined this separation with creative inquiry and arrived at strategic clarity; everything physical or worldly must be purged out of the mental space.
This interpretation allowed for the visual language to prioritise uninterrupted, expansive negative space that allows in all spiritual and emotional thoughts to freely flow.
I leave my computer screen and go to the bigger screen. I find inspiration in media, the good, the critically acclaimed, and the dodgy. So I'll either be watching the news, the movies with the worst ratings, or rewatching the classics like The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and Chernobyl. Because as the great Marshall McLuhan says "We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us"
Kenya has been on my list for a few years now. My father lived there for a few years and I remember all the stories he told me about its beauty, and later in 2019 when I was working with the Swvl team on launching in the Kenyan market, I was in awe with its thriving tech, design, and arts communities.
"Don't be too critical of yourself." - The hustle culture we've been taught to believe is the reason for success is actually the reason why we experience burn out more often, especially for those in the creative discipline. It's taken some time for me to unlearn that sacrificing my sleep and my social life won't help me win pitches or create impressive work.
Well, in the past few years pew. has been making more global moves with offices in Los Angeles, California and Dubai, UAE, so we're always on the lookout for creative talents to join our team!
