Islamic art and architecture has gotten recognition and acknowledgment worldwide, but when it comes to Arab Art and Graphic Design as a whole, so little has been written to document the history. That’s where Bahia Shehab and Haytham Nawar come in; they are the graphic design professors and researchers that decided to write the first book about the History of Arab Graphic Design. Shehab, professor of the practice of design and founder of the graphic design program at The American University in Cairo (AUC), decided to write the book with Nawar when she realized there are no books on the history of Arab graphic design that collectively speak about the field. “There are books on, for example, specific topics; posters in Lebanon, Helmy El Tony as a designer, different designers with the Khatt books, but not a book that talks about the history of Arab graphic design over a long period of history, which is 100 years and spans over a big geography from Morocco to Iraq,” Shehab told Egyptian Streets. For a very long time, Shehab had been feeling the need for a textbook of the kind to be…
