Design

D

Design that survives translation

Most identity work is designed once, in one language, by someone who will never see it set in another script. Then it goes international and quietly falls apart.

I have been a graphic designer for over twenty years and a foreign language typesetter since 2005. That combination is unusual, and it is the whole point of this page: I design things that still work when the words change.


Logo transliteration

Rendering a wordmark in another script while keeping the structure, weight, rhythm and character of the original. Not a translation with the old logo’s colours applied — an actual redraw that reads as the same brand to someone who cannot read the original.

This is genuinely difficult and very few people do it well. Letterforms that carry a brand in Latin have no direct equivalent in Arabic or Chinese, so the job is to find what carries the same feeling rather than the same shapes.

Multilingual brand adaptation

Taking an existing identity and making it work across the languages a business actually operates in — typeface pairing across scripts, how the logo behaves in right-to-left layouts, what happens to a tagline that runs 40% longer in German, and which parts of a brand system can flex and which must not.

Identity and websites

Logos, wordmarks, stationery, signage, advertising and websites — the ordinary design work, done properly, for clients who want one person accountable from first sketch to print-ready file.

Recent identity and web work is on the portfolio page.


How I work

  • Everything in-house. Nothing subcontracted, nothing outsourced
  • Source files handed over at the end — you own what you paid for
  • Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign and After Effects; WordPress for web
  • If it will ever need to exist in another language, I will tell you at the sketch stage rather than after it is printed

Jaber Maycid

About the author

I'm a foreign language typesetter and multilingual desktop publisher. Since 2005 I've set type in over 130 languages, including right-to-left and Canadian Indigenous scripts — and I now build automation for the formatting work around translation.

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