mind the gap.jpg

I enjoyed the Kufi workshop very much, although it took me a while until I found the time to actually turn my initial sketch into a final graphic. I used this graphic for a footwear trend book we made about combining different folkloric elements from all over the world. That was also the reason I took the workshop. Instead of choosing Arab words, I picked a text that is part of our own modern Western-European 'folklore': "Mind the Gap". I chose this slogan intentionally because if you take it literally, it could also refer to the gap between cultures. Using the principles of Kufi - creating a mosaic of words with exactly as much space as letters - I then placed the words in the shape of a folkloric Norwegian star. In the center I wanted to add the word 'never', so the whole graphic would say: "never mind the gap". I chose a latin font with an arabic look for the word 'never' and then placed and repeated that in the center of the star, to create a 'plus' shape, thus emphasizing that we should not mind the culture gap and that combining cultures can be a 'plus', in other words, an enrichment of our society. I used this as a placed graphic on a shoe, but of course it could also be applied in a pattern.