Samar Maakaroun’s branding for Design Doha Biennial 2026 draws on stretching letterforms to connect the system.
Ever designed for a bilingual audience? Let’s just say it can be a challenge. I first discovered this myself a couple of decades back, when I was working as an English teacher in Japan.
When I was putting together worksheets that combined English and Japanese lettering, it became crystal clear how little they had in common, and how tricky it was to fit everything together in a way that made visual sense.
And that was just a way of presenting homework to kids. The difficulty increases tenfold when you try to develop a professional design system. Whatever you do, one language seems to end up as the accidental “lead”, making the other seem visually subservient, which risks rubbing one language group up the wrong way.
Pentagram partner Samar Maakaroun and her team set out to avoid that in their new identity for Design Doha Biennial 2026. But they didn’t just cross their fingers and hope for the best. They came up with a clever technique that built that balance into the design from the ground up.
In simple terms, rather than stacking one script above the other, the identity weaves Arabic and English together into a single typographic composition, with neither language taking second place.
What is Design Doha Biennial?
Design Doha Biennial is the largest platform for design in the Arab region, bringing together exhibitions, public projects and collaborations across Qatar’s capital. With the second, expanded edition opening 5 November, it aims to be a meeting point for designers, curators, collectors and audiences across the region.
“Design Doha Biennial is a rich platform that highlights the diversity of design practices across the Arab world,” says Samar. “Its remit strengthens the creative ecosystem by building networks, creating opportunities and amplifying the voices of designers working across disciplines.” Given that remit, the Pentagram team leaned into the idea of connection. Rather than designing a fixed logo, they created a flexible typographic system.
“DDB’s brand functions as a flexible typographic system designed to express relationships between people, languages and disciplines,” Samar explains. “At its core, it is a bilingual structure that gives equal presence to Arabic and English. This balance reflects the cultural reality of the region and reinforces the Biennial’s role as a bridge between different cultures.”
This is immediately evident in the logo. Latin and Arabic characters sit side by side, drawn with the same thin, even stroke. As a result, they read more like one family than two separate scripts.
Connective typography
The key to making all this work is the extended strokes of the letterforms, which stretch and expand like lines on a network, allowing them to act as connectors between the different elements.
The letterforms can expand and contract to suit different formats, so the brand feels variable and ever-changing. It’s also a neat visual way of reflecting the event’s role as a place where ideas circulate and relationships form.
On the posters, the wordmark sits over photography of installations and objects from the programme, while in other layouts an outsized “26” loops around and frames a central image.
Colour palette
The colour palette, meanwhile, balances the twin ideas of materiality and energy. Travertine-inspired beige and a deep maroon evoke the region’s architecture and geology. A vivid orange conveys the sense of brightness and optimism around the festival. And the saturated Design Doha blue carries over from the previous identity, keeping a visual link to the first edition and making for a punchy, eye-catching combo along with the orange.
The Pentagram team also created a distinct expression of the identity for the headline exhibition, Arab Design Now. This keeps the same bilingual typography and connective letterforms, but pushes the latter into a bolder register.
While the main identity is all fine lines, Arab Design Now is built from heavy, solid geometric shapes that lock together to form letters and numerals. It’s a great way to make the exhibition stand out while still clearly belonging to the same family.
Why it works
Ultimately, what makes the overall identity work is that the concept and the execution are one and the same. Design Doha Biennial 2026 exists to connect people, cultures and disciplines. That’s reflected visually by the connectivity of the typography, the way the two languages sit on equal terms, and how the lines reach out to link one element to the next.
For a region where Arabic and English sit side by side in everyday life, that means this isn’t just nice-looking branding. This is a clear statement about who the Biennial is for, and it’s a model creatives working on bilingual identities everywhere can learn from.
