Author Archives: Ahmad Humeid

A better way for small businesses to create branding, social and digital. Why SYNTAX is launching PROTOTYPE?

Ahmad Humeid
CoFounder and CEO, SYNTAX

At SYNTAX we love restaurant metaphors. Sometimes we are ACTUALLY working on restaurant brands and would LITERALLY be discussing restaurant ideas. But even when branding an architectural office, a tech company, a barbershop or even debating the nature of our own company or services, restaurant metaphors are often a great help to get ideas across.

“Is this travel brand a McDonald’s or a gourmet restaurant?” or “Who is the chef with the secret recipe at this tech startup?” or “There is tension between the kitchen and the waiters at that consulting firm.” These are the kinds of sentences that you might hear if you were a fly on the wall in a SYNTAX meeting room (or a SYNTAX Zoom or Skype call, these days).

Such a restaurant metaphor came up towards the end of 2020 as we were debating how to start 2021. The subject of the debate: how can SYNTAX be more relevant to small and medium businesses after a year when everyone, including us (we are ourselves a small business), had a very tough year.

As you are reading this, the SYNTAX team would have launched our first coordinated promotional campaign ever. It is called PROTOTYPE and it is completely focused on small and medium businesses, covering three critical service areas: how SMEs create their brands. How do they stand out on social media. How do they create a digital presence.

As we were discussing and developing this campaign, we hit a bump? What can SYNTAX realistically provide SMEs with in the current tough economic situation? Are we simply “shrinking” our services into a smaller size? Are we starting a “cheaper” alternative to our usual services? What value do we want to provide to SMEs?

And that is when a restaurant metaphor came up in one of our Skype calls

If SYNTAX were a restaurant would we be a McDonald’s or a gourmet eatery?

We cook original, bespoke brand experiences, based on deep research and concept development processes. Everything we do is custom made and crafted. There are no cookie cutter solutions or copy and paste templates. This would make us more of a gourmet restaurant. And yes, this makes us expensive to hire for most SMEs.

Although our portfolio is dotted with work we did for small/medium businesses, bigger institutional work has taken the place of prominence in people’s perception of what we do.

So are we a “gourmet restaurant” mainly catering for “big” clients?

In truth, that is not the case. But that might be the perception. In a recent call we had with a friend who is running a startup, that perception came through loud and clear. Oops.

We are definitely gourmet. Yet at the same time a big part of our journey has been spent working with small businesses, social enterprises and startups.

We love the impact we can have when working intimately with founders and owners. The risk takers, the driven, the passionate, the geeky, the fighters. They are the real heroes of the economy.

How can we, at the start of 2021, play a role in energizing small and medium businesses. How can we provide services that are relevant to SMEs today in a world that is ever more digital, where brands are often born on a screen, competing in a social space that is getting ever more noisy.

More importantly, how can we price our services in a way that makes sense to SMEs when money is tight.

“Launch a McDonalds!” is the advice that often gets given whenever the SME question comes up.

But no. That’s not us. There must be another way.

That other way is our PROTOTYPE initiative. Think of it as a gourmet restaurant throwing its door open to a wider audience. But instead of forcing everyone to buy the twenty one course, four hour, super expensive dinner, how about offering a lighter, more modular and more affordable dining experience that gives more and more people the chance to sample the tasty ingredients and the magical techniques of the chefs in the kitchen?

Are you hungry yet?

OK. Enough with the restaurant metaphors. Let’s talk Branding. Social. Digital.

The SME dilemma

Most SMEs, constrained by small budgets, end up getting stuck with cookie cutter brand designs, provided by “logo making” sites, or agencies who do “cheap and quick” work. SMEs social media efforts are often handled by social media agencies who mostly outsource to inexperienced, poorly paid college kids. And when it comes to the all-important digital storefronts, sites and apps, ready-made templates are quickly put on the table.

Sometimes these solutions work. Sometimes they don’t. A ready made logo or web template can sometimes do the job. Sometimes not. It’s hit and miss at best.

But for ambitious small business owners and smart startups, such solutions are generally a bad way to build their brands and their interfaces of interaction with their customers.

The key missing ingredient is simply: proper thinking before doing. In more fancy terms: research, strategy and concept development. Good design is not about winning a beauty contest. Good design of brands, social media campaigns and digital solutions should always start with asking the right questions and coming up with original ideas and solutions that stand out in the market and open windows for innovation and customer delight. That’s what SMEs are mostly missing out on.

We believe that our PROTOTYPE initiative can be a solution to this problem.

Brand big. Own social. Rock digital.

Under PROTOTYPE we are launching three services: BRANDxs, SOCIALdna and DIGITALxp. Each of these services is a three week engagement that uses the essence of the SYNTAX process to create branding, social and digital “prototypes”, providing SMEs with usable tools, assets and roadmaps for future development.

A prototype is not a final product. But it is also not just an idea or a sketch. A prototype is a working model, a proof of concept. Prototypes are an amazing way to create, learn and iterate.

Here is a concrete example: let’s say you are an owner of a small pastry shop (here we go again!). Your current logo was created for five Dollars on one of those sites. Maybe it was good enough to get you going. Now, business is picking up and your pastries are being delivered by food ordering apps and stocked in a couple of supermarket. You feel that your small pastry shop has big potential. But your five Dollar logo really says “I’m a five dollar logo”. Your packaging is basically “designed” by the printing shop (he stretched your logo horizontally!). And your Instagram grid is full of pictures taken with a mobile phone (no shame in that) with a greasy lens (not good). Things are inconsistent and chaotic. Your brand doesn’t speak well for you.

It would be nice if you could come to SYNTAX for a full branding solution (it would be nice for us too!). But after all sorts of financial troubles in 2020 you simply cannot afford a branding project that could go into five figures. What do you do? Is your only choice to go for cookie-cutter, templated and quick’n’dirty solutions? AGAIN?

No.

You call us. We spend some time on the phone to get a basic understanding of your needs and we sign you up for the 3 week BRANDxs workshop. In the first week our team, (which includes people with 10, 15, 20 and 30 years of experience) will dive deep into your business and industry and work closely with you to determine your real priorities. And in the remaining two weeks we work on a PROTOTYPE, which could include a new logo and color scheme, but also strategic ideas about your communication tone-of-voice, your long term brand values, options for positioning your pastry business, and maybe an initial roadmap for the development of your brand over the next 3 years.

Or perhaps the priority is packaging. Your five Dollar logo may actually be fine after some minor tweaking by us. So we spend most of the two weeks coming up with an amazing package design that stands out on the shelf (and in an Instagram grid).

It’s all about flexibility, modularity and setting priorities. And it’s all based on research, understanding and sound strategy. These are the tools we use for big brands. If we get our priorities right together, there is nothing stopping us from working with you on a brand prototype that your pastry shop can build on.

Then, you start implementing and using the ideas and elements you got from the BRANDxs workshop. Hopefully the impact will be clear. Your sales grow. Your brand gets more recognized. And you come back in 6 months ready for a more comprehensive branding project, because now you are ready to conquer the world (not just the neighborhood).

Maybe you don’t need branding. Maybe you need to find your authentic voice on social media. Go for SOCIALdna to start creating that social persona and style that is truly you. Or maybe your next step is to create the ultimate pastry customization app! Go for DIGITALxp and make sure you have a basic, solid prototype of a delightful user experience for your app before you start investing in developing it.

PROTOTYPE is also a prototype for SYNTAX

Our commitment to serving companies and organizations both large and small will not change. And our set of end-to-end services will not change. Yet, we are all excited about the potential of this campaign and what new SME encounters it will bring.

We too are prototyping a number of firsts for SYNTAX in the context of this initiative. PROTOTYPE is the first time in our 22 year history where we will leave our “word of mouth” comfort zone and embark on a social media and search campaign in a number of countries in the Arab region and beyond. So don’t be surprised if you see a SYNTAX ad popping up on LinkedIn and Instagram.

Another first for us is that we are launching this campaign in both Arabic and English. In truth, it is kind of bizarre that a company like ours that not only has crafted communication in Arabic for over two decades but also pushed the boundaries of Arabic visual design, restricts itself to an English-only website. It’s bizarre but not uncommon. So while we are not going fully bilingual, this campaign is a good place to start and we hope that it will deliver our message and services to a new audience as well.

Calling all SME heroes

If you are the leader of a small or medium business we invite you to check out the special landing page we created here. We’d love to hear your opinion on the PROTOTYPE initiative and we hope that we can welcome you within the SYNTAX community soon.

If you are not an SME owner, well, thank you for making it this far in this message! But whether you are a consultant, a corporate leader or working in the non-profit sector, we’d like to hear from you as well. What do you think SMEs need to navigate challenging times and how can their role in the region’s economy be strengthened?

As a small, ambitious business ourselves, we feel PROTOTYPE speaks to us as well. We have experienced the ups and downs. The hopes and fears. The triumphs and the letdowns. And we sincerely hope that our accumulated knowledge can have help lift up SME heroes to new heights. We believe that our community of small and medium businesses can do big things, creating a productive economy and an empowered society, whether they are startups founded last week or, like us, those who have been on this road for decades.

> Check out our campaign landing page here.
> Check out our latest work here.
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Life. Interrupted.

Just a few months ago, going through SYNTAX’s door, you’ll walk straight into a flurry of activity; heated conversations discussing a webpage or an app interface, a group reviewing logo sketches hung all over the wall are posing as art critiques, our COO stands at the edge of the designers’ space and jokes around with the juniors in a startling tenor that frankly makes you jump a little. Our CEO broods over a particularly challenging project in the meeting room with another group arguing strategy or naming or experience, while project coordinators run around between phone calls to get on someone’s case about something or another, and a few designers stare at their screen with their headphones on, humming happily along and oblivious to the hubbub. Lunch time comes around and everyone gathers around our communal table for a bite and a laugh. We have our rough spots, like any other office out there, but, good vibes, all around.

Then…Covid.

Half the team is working from home, probably spending days on end in their PJs, beards unshaven, hair uncombed. The other half mopes around the office, with a sad looking apple or sandwich sitting on their desk. You’re out of touch with family, friends, colleagues, clients, and you make do. Everybody is on Zoom or Skype or Teams or whatever app that passes for real human connection, (which is when the PJ clad designers hurry to slap on a t-shirt to present some sense of normalcy). Work-from-home methods are discussed and debated and discarded. Disinfectants are distributed throughout the offices, masks are tucked in pockets… you know the drill.

You don’t know what to worry about, the economy or family or do you have enough supplies if the country goes into lockdown, do we have enough toilet paper? What is the deal with toilet paper? No one seems to have a clear handle on the proper protocols; Masks on or off? Schools open or closed? Go out or lock yourself in? Visit family or Skype (again)? Can I hug my mother? Life as usual? No.

And the memes, my God, the memes. As a country we do have an uncanny ability to laugh at just about everything, don’t we? But in all honesty, if I see one more ‘this year doesn’t count’ meme I might just pack it in and call it a day.

It has been quite a year, painful, frightening, heartbreaking, yes, but a few tiny bright spots (we did say goodbye to a certain orange president of a faraway country, or will soon). What you realize is that across the globe, across race and faith and social status, under the threat of a global pandemic we are all human, we are all afraid, yes, but we are tenacious, resilient, and hopeful.

Through it all the SYNTAX team has not lain dormant, we’ve kept busy, thankfully, though just like everyone else, it was tricky for a while. And just like everyone else we dug our heels in and got to work, because, well, that’s what you do.

Traveling
through time

Looking back at those past 12 months, we’ve managed to work on quite a few projects, and it is always interesting to see what happens to the work once it’s been released into the wild. One project we had worked tirelessly on and we had been excited to launch this year is the new Jordan Tourism brand. We partnered up with the Jordan Tourism Board to work on an innovative new tourism brand that puts Jordan on the modern stage of global tourism. Crystalizing an entire country and its appeal to a wide range of tourists is no easy task, but months of toil paid off with a new tourism brand that we’re proud of, and with new memories and friendships that we will always treasure. A big shout out to our friends at London-based firm Something More Near, who collaborated with us on the project, bringing in their unique point of view from the other side of the globe.

Sadly, COVID had other plans for tourism.

Tourism halted to a stop as travel became restricted to necessity only, and we ended up looking fondly back on beach memories as we coop up in our homes in anticipation of a long, cold winter, with no escape to sunny locales in the foreseeable future. It made us realize how freeing it is to jump on a plane, train or car, to a place that is not here, wherever here is (at this point to just to head out of Amman would be a vacation). An Ironic twist of fate, it would seem, as we had only finalized a travel startup brand just before COVID came knocking. A brand around a community of travelers with a shared interest in exploration, The School of Travel was the result of our Venture DNA process. The team worked collaboratively with the founders to fine-tune the business strategy, developing scenarios to imagine the future possibilities of the venture.

Travel and tourism have always held a special appeal to us; weaving the threads of archeology, history, adventure and art into the tapestry of contemporary urban life and presenting it to the modern world. We particularly enjoyed a voyage into Nabatean history with our work on the Petra Museum, where we created a series of videos and panels on the ancient Nabatean history; the daily lives of the people of Petra, the magnificence of their art and architecture, and the genius of their engineering.

Ice cream coming
to the rescue

During the early months of the pandemic, after the two months of curfew, the entire country emerged scrambling to make sense of a new world, the most surprising thing came to our rescue at SYNTAX; a new ice cream brand. This simple sweet concoction was just the thing to kick us back into high gear. Our old friends at The Cakery decided to launch their ice cream with a new brand and a social media campaign. Excited about working with The Cakery again, and not just because they always pamper us with sweet treats (yours truly has a helluva sweet tooth), but The Cakery On Ice promised to be a fun and joyful project to work on, and a great way to let everyone forget about viruses and social distancing for a just a bit (everyone kept their masks on, don’t worry). We created the On Ice brand, came up with ice cream flavor names, and developed the campaign and brand video with the help of Eyad Shamieh behind the camera, skillfully manipulating light and motion (and food styling) to produce fantastic visuals for us.

More on this project

The Cakery On Ice brought into focus the global community’s heightened shift to digital. Or rather, it accelerated a trend that has already taken the world by storm. Online solutions made the loneliness a little easier to bear. Economically it makes sense, social media campaigns are much more feasible for businesses on a budget. And socially, how else will you make your brand speak to each individual person from the comfort of their own screen? Which made our next new adventure just basic common sense. We had worked with Khaldoon Tabbaza previously on several projects, the latest of which was Imena. As one of the first digital pioneers of the region, Khaldoun decided to launch the Venture Oasis Podcast, which delves into the tech/digital startup ecosystem of the Arab World. And of course we jumped at the chance to create a brand experience about digital! In typical SYNTAX fashion we got a little carried away, and our CEO and team spent hours testing out mics, lighting, and software and developing visual toolkits to help our client set up a sustainable process to create branded video content.

Also recently our team has been busy with an exceptional brand that hails from KSA. Sukna Ventures is a venture studio and fund that partners with entrepreneurs and startups to help build and grow businesses with meaningful interventions in the way we live, play, and work. Working from the ground up, SV has a hands on approach, working with startups from the early stages of their development to help them get started the right way, leveraging market knowledge and aligning businesses with KSA’s long term economic goals.

Little Thinking Minds soon came into play to push the point further. Schools have been inconsistent at best for months, and parents need a reliable app to help stabilize learning at home. LTM’s I Read Arabic app, popular amongst schools, was brought to the parents in the Arab Region and anywhere else really where parents wanted to help their kids master Arabic. Harnessing our love of communication and conceptualisation on social media, we collaborated with LTM on producing several campaigns, with more to come in the coming few months.

Social doesn’t mean
only social media

Although years from now we will probably look back at 2020 and think only of the pandemic, there were many other global and regional issues that arose; Trump’s administration wreaked havoc as it moved its embassy to occupied Jerusalem. Lebanon’s economy and capital literally went up in flames, and the Lebanese took to the streets for months on end. Greta Thunberg captured our hearts and became an icon for environmental activists, and social justice and equality remain a pressing humanitarian cause, brought into sharper relief today with the pandemic rearing its ugly head, baring its teeth at community’s most vulnerable.

It’s easy for us as designers to lose ourselves in interface design, beautifully rendered typography and visuals, but we aren’t living in a bubble of our own making, and sometimes a client helps us to fully engage in conversations around issues of civil rights and social justice.

Enter Barlaman Sha3b (the people’s parliament). SYNTAX designed a web portal for the interactive, inclusive civil rights initiative that revolves around a virtual parliament elected freely by the people of the Arab world. The parliament discusses critical and contemporary issues of Arabia, raising awareness and promoting free expression. We had a responsibility to design a transparent and fair election process through a simple and informative interface. After the election concluded the interface transformed to deliver virtual video sessions of the parliament, engaging the public with discussions on everything from Palestinian identity, to civilian rights, to fighting unemployment.

Shifting gears a bit! What favorite past time remained true to its fans throughout the pandemic? There is nothing quite like sports to get a group of people to light up and discuss strategy, players and teams, no matter what they do for a living or how they spend their time. Dismayed at the state of Arabic sports websites, our client opted to launch WinWin, a new Arab sports portal, with a user-centric digital experience offering game analysis, scores leaderboards, videos and news for the avid sports fan.

We just have to pause for a moment here to say farewell to the sports world favorite footballer and inspiration to thousands of young boys and girls, Argentinian legend Maradona.

We can go on and on about digital, but there’s not enough room! Here are a few other digital projects we’ve worked on this year to keep an eye out for.

Visit website here

Branding for the
here and now

Education is a recurring theme for SYNTAX, especially true in 2020. The Manhajiat brand was launched earlier this year, addressing educators from the Arab world. The Arabic-speaking online magazine was created to discuss methods and best practices of pedagogy, as well as policies and networking, for the modern Arab educator.

More on this project

Perhaps a sobering symptom of these times, an early project that arose straight out of this pandemic is a new hand sanitizer brand, Humetec that was launched in the US. Our client intuitively recognized a need for a sanitizer that is mild on the skin and strong enough to give customers, whether medical professionals or the general public, the confidence to go out into the world.

Life Resumed

This crisis, this blockbuster of a Hollywood-movie-IRL (‘in real life’ in actual english) has left us all with our heads spinning. But it also spoke volumes about the human condition, and what it is to be human, what we really need as individuals and as a community. We saw the emergence of prominent themes; education technology, locally sourced food, digital adoption, and social development, all vital for the survival of any society in 2020 and onward. After the pandemic, we will all have a role to play in the economic rebuilding our countries, starting from the same premise; education, food, security, digital, amongst others. Tourism will also be key to the economic rebuilding, and we hope that 2021 will see the return of tourism to the country, and that Jordan will be ready with a new brand to welcome tourists.

Looking forward, branding, authentic communication and original content will be called for to rise above the clamor, to get a fighting chance to thrive, and do some actual good in the days to come. At SYNTAX, we will do our part in enabling businesses and organizations with branding and design, and social and digital tools and communication, to help our community get back on its feet.

All in all, I’m sure everyone will agree that we’re glad to be rid of 2020. And we’re hopeful and optimistic about tomorrow. So happy new year world! And may 2021 bring you all joy, peace of mind, and a return to normal.

Stay safe, healthy and strong, everyone.

Lina Abdulhadi
Design Director

How has life in your office adapted to Covid? We’d love to compare notes!

Moving Design: from luxury to necessity

Ahmad Humeid and Dina Haddadin talk about the curatorial process behind Amman Design in Week’s Hangar Exhibition.

“My School, my university, snapshots of my life”

Three weeks of my life, poured into 3 minutes of film

Sure, you can simply see it as a promotional video for an educational institution (more about the project here). That’s totally fine.

But there is something personal about this project that brings multiple threads of my life together. My old school (the University Model School, adjacent to the new HQ of the Queen Rania Teacher Academy). It‘s where I became a teenager and made life-defining friendships. The University of Jordan, where my late father spent almost his entire professional career teaching and researching at the Faculty of Agriculture, and from where I graduated as an architect in the mid 1990s. The University‘s forested campus, dotted with the modernist 1960s buildings of the late architect Atallah Duwani was an important stage of my childhood and early adulthood (and where I met Salua, my life partner). Speaking of architecture, the new building celebrated in this film is by Faris and Faris, the architectural firm of Faris Zaru and Faris Abdelrahman, two (slightly older) colleagues of mine in the Faculty of Engineering, who have been consistently producing important works of contemporary architecture in the past two and a half decades in Jordan.

As I was writing the script of this film, I couldn’t help but make it about continuity. Looking back, looking forward. I briefly delved into the history of teacher training institutions and the stories of the pioneering teachers of Jordan in the 20th century. These stories became the starry-sky opening sequence. And in the last frame of the story we leave through the building‘s ‘star-gate’..

I am lucky to have clients like QRTA who trust me with their stories. Lucky to have a team at SYNTAX who can manage the delivery of such stories (and my sometimes chaotic methods of working). Lucky to have partners of creative integrity like Majd and Ali at Labiba Productions, who not only deliver footage of impeccable quality, but, most importantly, a profoundly human and artistic photographic eye to the story.

Yeah. It’s a 3 minute (and twenty seconds) video about teacher training. It has a job to fulfill. And I hope it does it.

But between the frames, snapshots of my life are captured.

(A special thank you goes to double-shift.org project for granting us permission to use video clips by Marjam Fels and Paula Ellguth, who documented the life inside one of Jordan’s public schools).

Six ways to un-frustrate 2019

Ahmad Humeid, Co-Founder and CEO, SYNTAX

If you lived in the Arab region in the past few years, frustration must have become woven, in big and small ways, into the fabric of your daily reality. Regional conflicts and their resulting human tragedies, economic recession, bad governance and squandered human potential have all conspired to put the region in a state of tension and developmental limbo.

Not even the 2018 World Cup gave us a respite, as we watched Saudi Arabia and Qatar play a game, not of football, but of harsh political bickering over the broadcasting rights of the matches!

Your view of the region may differ depending on where you’re watching it from. But the reality of fragmentation and uncertainty is pervasive. In any case, this reality is hard to ignore from Amman. With one eye on Palestine, another one on Syria and Iraq, and a third one on developments in the Arabian Peninsula, we in Jordan feel the turbulent waters of the region. And our own local waters have also been troublesome. Even the long-awaited winter rain brought us deep sadness as the floods took the lives of our young and old in one of the biggest national tragedies in recent memory.

Whoever I talk to in the business community in Amman, be it owners and managers of large corporations, small business owners or startup founders, everyone seems to have taken a beating in 2018. Sales have crashed, insolvencies have risen, consumer confidence has disappeared. Street protests in Ramadan brought about a governmental change, but we are yet to see if this government can steer the country to safety.

For us at SYNTAX, 2018 has not been an easy year either. By year’s end I started to ask myself “what have I done in 2018?”. As I reviewed our projects, I noticed that we worked on a lot of things, but few of them have been launched for a variety of reasons, most of which were out of our, or our clients’, control. It was simply a lot of hard work that the team still has to wait to celebrate in 2019.

But what about 2019? The consensus amongst citizens and businesses seems pretty pessimistic. While people try to discern the few glimmers of hope in the region at the start of this new year, talk of an approaching global financial crisis in 2020 is also a part of people’s conversations.

But “the show must go on“.

Crisis is a call for action. Stress is an impetus for change. The end of an era is a good time for reflection and an opportunity to shed the weight of the past and move on. And difficult times can bring people closer together.

So in that spirit, here are 6 things we at SYNTAX can do to out-maneuver frustration, recession, stagnation and disconnection.

These are ideas that move us, not new year’s resolutions. Inspirations, not a game plan. A mindset, not a prescription. We are sharing these ideas hoping they resonate with other people. And who knows, maybe they can spark conversations, connections and alliances within our community in Jordan, the region and beyond.

1. Put the past in a box. Celebrate it. Give it away.

In 2019 SYNTAX will turn 21 years old. We’re not a teenager anymore, but a fully “legal” adult. In 2018, perhaps oddly, we did not celebrate our 20th anniversary as companies usually do. Why? I could tell you we were too busy (and I wouldn’t be lying). But I think the real reason is that we simply weren’t ready to celebrate. As I look at all the work we struggled to bring to life over two decades in the context of Jordan and the region, I feel a combination of nostalgia, bewilderment and and a ting of “was it all worth it?”

As we look back, and forward, we hope to find a way to distill our experience in design, branding, digital media and innovation in a way that is meaningful to us, and hopefully to others. We’d like to package our story, put it in a box (maybe a book or a film or both) and share it with the world.

Our accumulated stories and narratives, be they personal, communal or corporate are important bedrocks of our identities. But there comes a moment, when we need to make room for new stories. So share your story by properly telling it. Then write a full-stop. And start a new chapter.

2. Become a beginner again.

This one is not easy. But it’s a must.

I recently watched a documentary called A Head full of Dreams, about Coldplay, one of the biggest bands of our time (who are also celebrating 20 years since their founding). At the end of 2017 they finished a 2-year global mega-tour in which they played to over 5 million people, grossing over half a billion dollars in ticket sales.

In the documentary, Coldplay members talked about their approach to their work and their concerts. They don’t take their achievements and experience for granted. They feel like they have to earn the right to walk up to that stage and play music for tens of thousands of people as if it was their first concert. They start at rock bottom every time. They have to rehearse. They don’t feel as if they’ve “made it”.

Here’s what that means to me: we have to systematically ignore our experience. Not because our experience is worthless. But because it can blind us from the opportunities and challenges that emerge everyday.

Personally, I cannot escape the fact that I became a designer in the early 1990s, infatuated with computers, falling in love with typography and newspaper design and discovering the early web, then, by the 2000s, learning all about branding. That’s how I built my company and maintained it for two decades.

But as a design company, we need to ask ourselves from scratch: what should we design for today’s generation of citizens, buyers, learners and entrepreneurs? What does it mean to build a brand on Instagram? How do teens and young adults deal with the flood of fake news? How to build Arduino prototypes? Is branding still relevant?

It’s easy to get stuck in the jaded mindset of the expert who’s “seen it all”. But amidst the uncertainty of 2019, we all have to remind ourselves that every day is a new chance to learn something new about the world, acquire a new skill and change our mind. This year, let’s try to get unstuck from the expert mindset by allowing ourselves to have a beginner’s mind again.

3. Clean up your brand.

Many business leaders and owners I talked to recently have referred to 2019 (especially in Jordan) as a year where they don’t expect to see any business growth. Some are seeing it as a chance to “clean up the house”.

For us at SYNTAX we hope to “clean up our brand” this year.

Five years ago, when we celebrated our 15th anniversary, we worked hard on creating a new website, based on a new understanding of our brand. In retrospect, I now realize that we overloaded our home page with smart-sounding talk about the “impact” our work can have, and so on.

Our work at the intersection of design, branding, technology and innovation has certainly evolved over the past decades. But we recently haven’t done the best job in communicating what we do in a simple, friendly manner. In the past months we started to have conversations about slimming down our service offering, using a simpler language and not taking ourselves too seriously.

But we need to go further.

There’s nothing like an economic recession to force you to look yourself in the mirror and ask yourself: what do I really stand for? How can I be of service? Who am I talking to? These are the fundamental questions any brand needs to continuously ask itself. 2019 seems like a good time to do that.

4. Truly embrace the web, not as a technology, but as a market.

We are a company that was built on the promise of the web and its unbounded global potential. A company that was there at the birth of web 1.0, more than two decades ago, and that helped usher in the Arab web 2.0 a decade ago. Yet we find ourselves today with a sporadically updated web site and no YouTube channel to speak of. Funny.

We are digital transformation pioneers. We‘ve built groundbreaking sites and digital initiatives for corporations, government and startups. But it‘s time we swallowed some of our own medicine!

When we started designing and developing websites in the 1990s they were considered exotic new creatures that had yet to prove their worth for business. It’s only in the past few years that our own website has become a sales tool, as a generation that grew up with the web is now in a position to make corporate buying decisions. And yes, they turn to Google and Facebook to find potential suppliers.

Digital and social media are the new normal. And even we, the digital pioneers, need to rethink what the web means for our business.

With Jordan and the region in an extreme slowdown, we truly need to embrace the web not as a technology, but as a living breathing global market. We need to change our mindset about where our next project will come from.

Here, I draw inspiration from YouTubers. Many of them don’t talk to their own countries. They greet their audience by saying “hey YouTube”. A Canadian tech YouTuber reviews Chinese phones that are popular in India. A Japanese knife expert gets millions of views for videos where he silently shows the world how to make a knife out of anything you can think of (for example: smoke!) A New York food YouTuber shows the world how to make a Falafel sandwich.

Accepting the web as a market requires a major mind shift from anyone who has been doing business locally for a long time. Design and branding can be very local, requiring a deep understanding of local communication, behavior, culture and history. Positioning ourselves to be relevant for the global web market is new territory for us.

Or is it?

Fun fact: SYNTAX had offices in New York and Berlin in the year 2000. That’s a story for another time. But in 2019 we really need to start building a new office in the cloud and get comfortable with that.

5. Make stuff.

As in: make physical stuff. Over the past decade we have witnessed the rise of the Maker Movement. A powerful force at the intersection of design, new fabrication technologies, cheap electronics, software and traditional crafts.

In an alternate universe I might have become a product/industrial designer. But in this universe I ended up being an information, brand and digital designer, as I grew up in Jordan, where industry is relatively unsophisticated and undemanding of designers.

With the rise of 3D printing and other digital fabrication technologies, there is less of an excuse for us not to try to design and make physical objects. Even more exciting would be physical objects with little computers inside of them, connected to the net and doing smart stuff.

Over the past year I taught myself the ins and outs of 3D printing. I’ve bought tools and materials. Together with an ironsmith I designed and built a wood-fired pizza oven. And I intend to build my first Arduino project soon.

I really want to bring this culture of making into my company. And I look forward to working with clients and partners on interesting challenges that require visits to the carpenter, 3D CAD design, 3D printing and messing about with circuit boards.

There is something very satisfying in making even the simplest physical object. The tools we have today enable every company, large and small, to explore the potential of making things. Making things is human and gives us control over what we consume and use everyday. You should try it someday!

6. Find hope and power in community.

This is political. There is growing fear in the world today, stoked by those who want to build new walls between us. They want to convince us that the world is nothing but a harsh and dangerous place. In a region that is literally being torn apart by sectarian and political strife, it is easy to be resigned to such destructive narratives.

As designers, I believe, our entire profession is built on hope and openness. Hope that we as humans can make better lives and a better world. That we as designers can help by designing sustainable, responsible and beautiful things: all the way from fonts to communication, products, services, buildings, cities, and global systems of learning, production, connection and solidarity.

This cannot be done without openness to ideas, people and cultures. It is increasingly clear that we cannot maintain hope as disconnected islands.

Seven years ago we launched an initiative called Redesign Arabia. At that time I felt as if the Arab world would finally awaken and that a new generation would usher in an age of democracy, human rights and social justice. And I felt that design could play a pivotal role in creating a more productive and beautiful Arab life. While we all know how that went, we cannot give up hope or stop pushing for a future that is sustainable, equitable and productive.

More recently, in 2017, I had the privilege to be involved in the second edition of Amman Design Week as its curator, exposing me further to the opportunities and immense challenges faced by the nascent design community in Jordan and the region.

In 2019, SYNTAX will strive to connect, professionally and socially with the creative communities around us, in our city, Amman, across the region or across the world, seeking opportunities and building platforms that help us work together, think together, make together.

It also means simply reconnecting with friends and family. If we must struggle in 2019, at least we can struggle through it together.

Wishing you a productive, connected 2019.

Designing the Four Winters ice cream experience (Or when my kids finally understood my job!)

Recently I had the pleasure to give “career talks” at a number of private schools around Amman. You know; the kind of talk where you have to explain to high school kids what it is that you actually do.

Now, SYNTAX’s portfolio spans over 18 years of design projects. When we show our portfolio to professional adults, we mostly manage to impress them with our colorful slides. But let’s be honest. Tenth graders are a tougher crowd. I mean, what on earth does “web presence of a telecom” or “a brand for an outsourcing firm” or “UI/UX for a financial app” mean to those kids. Boring. That’s what.

So there I was getting them all pumped about about a career in design, and all I could show them was a “brand strategy” and “UX/UI”. But when an icon of a black and white penguin appeared on the projector screen, a theater full of kids shouted in unison: FOUR WINTERS.

Wow.

Four Winters – the brand experience we created for our friends the ice cream revolutionaries – has made my school presentations cool. And that’s not only because the Four Winters guys are really cool; as cool as the -196 C degrees liquid nitrogen which they use to freeze the liquid ice cream, or what we call “freezing the seasons”, in front of their customers eyes.

It’s cool because everyone “gets” ice cream. Like my kids for example.

OK! So they know their mom and dad are architects. But except designing our own house, we don’t have other architectural works to show them. I can’t point to a tower and say “see son, I designed that”. Bummer.

But when the first prototype shop of Four Winters opened in Abdoun over two years ago, not only could I point at that shop and say “kids, our company designed that shop”, and even better, they could go in and HAVE CRAZY ICE CREAM!

In fact, my oldest son was on a sort of summer internship with SYNTAX at the office when we worked with the Four Winters founders Abu Ali, Ali and Abid and their growing team. He was there when we dreamt up the brand and its business DNA together. And here is a secret I am giving away for the first time. Some of the ideas we developed were actually inspired by some food experiences pointed out to me by my son during our family vacations. My younger kids also participated in an early tasting session at the Four Winters’ make-shift lab, tucked away in one of Amman’s industrial zones.

So ice cream. Yeah. My kids get it. My mother gets it. And in Four Winters’ case it looks like the whole world will get it. Starting with London.

In the first half of this year, we were busy working with Four Winters’ dynamic CEO Zeid Zabian designing their first London shop which recently opened in London to great reviews. And more shops in the Middle East are on their way.

Our digital team also has been busy building a super-rich website for the company, bursting with delicious videos and photography which you can check out now at FourWinters.co.

It’s a brand made in Jordan, co-created by SYNTAX and courageous entrepreneurs to delight and surprise children, high school kids, parents and grand parents alike. It’s taking its first steps to become a global brand. It’s also a perfectly simple and engaging showcase on how innovation, design and branding can create great companies. Cool, ha?

Designing Amman’s Unofficial Transport Map. Transformative design meets urban activism

For the past seven months, SYNTAX has been working on a project which I consider to be one of the most meaningful our company has handled in recent years: designing Amman’s first public transport map.

As I write this, this map is being printed in a limited test quantity, to be distributed to Ammanis who are riding busses, “coasters” and service-taxis to get to their places of work, study, shopping, healthcare, leisure, or simply going home or to visit family or friends.

In a few weeks, the map will be printed in massive quantities for wider distribution. It will be available online and as as mobile apps for iOS and Android.

Yes. It’s time the residents and visitors of Amman, our capital, got a map that, for the first time ever makes the public transport system in our city (as broken as it is) visible. This has the potential to transform the experience of public transport in Amman in more than one way. It may end up making a small difference in the lives of millions. That’s why I think this project is so important.

I get quite emotional when I talk about this endeavor. Angry, sad, anxious, yet also excited, proud and energized.

I am dismayed that our city authorities have not been able to produce a map for us in the past decades. I get angry when I see Amman’s streets clogged with ever worsening traffic jams. I am sad to see the indignity of those who do not own cars, struggling to use a weak transportation system. We all deserve better. I am baffled at our governments who, over the past decades, have spent hundreds of millions of Dinars on roads, bridges and tunnels in Amman but ignored to develop a modern public transport system. Amman has become a congested, polluted, nerve-wracking city because of short-sighted policies driven by car-driving politicians and bureaucrats.

Yet I am also exhilarated to have been part of a project that fulfilled a lifelong dream of mine: producing a transport map for Amman. I blogged and talked about such a project in the past, but it took much more than that to make this a reality. And the reality is that it took a real initiator: Peter Damrosch, an American teacher who lived in Jordan for a while and who had the spark that started the fire: he got on busses and started tracking their routes on Google Maps, marking the beginning of an amazing journey.

Then it took an organization, Maan Nasel (Arriving Together): Jordan’s first grassroots campaign demanding a modern public transport system for all, who embraced Peter and his early collaborators, recruited more volunteers to finish mapping most of the city’s transport lines.

Then it took a brilliant designer, Ahmad Sabbagh, my collaborator at SYNTAX for over a decade, who somehow was able to learn the art of transport mapping in no time and craft an intricate work of highly functional design, that translates all the work done by the volunteers into something people can actually use in their daily lives.

I also feel humbled, because we, as SYNTAX designers, stood on the shoulders of giants: pioneers of transport mapping like Henry Charles Beck, the draughtsman who drew the London Tube Map in his spare time in 1931, inspired by the geometry of electrical circuits to create a geometrical transport map that prioritized connections over geography. But we also became aware of an entire global movement of volunteer-based map design projects in the developing world. Amman didn’t only learn from London, Berlin and New York, but also Dakha, Bangladesh and Nairobi, Kenya as well as many other cities around the globe, who’s mapping experiences where documented online for everyone to learn from.

The first design challenge SYNTAX had to deal with to produce a transport map for Amman was to come up with the underlying grid upon which all the map’s elements would be layered. We considered Amman’s major highways, streets, intersections and its famous traffic “circles” (roundabouts) and abstracted them using a strict geometrical system to produce our first grid. We then added the city’s neighborhoods (many based on Amman’s well known hills), public parks and well known landmarks. Our aim was to enable people to relate the map to the common mental model they have of the city.

Downtown Amman, where a lot of transport lines converge, had to be enlarged in proportion to the the city’s other neighborhoods. This way, the intricate network of lines in the downtown area was made clearly readable. Amman’s two “ring roads” where indicated to on the map to define the boundaries of the city’s inner core and its outer belt of suburbs.

Only then could we add the 76 documented transport lines on the map. A color coding system was devised that classifies the lines into their general directions and make it easy for the user to follow the path of any given transport line.

In designing all the intricate details, symbols and visual elements of this map we drew on the collective experiences of the volunteering team behind this project which included transport experts, urbanists and activists. We also learned from the wealth of case studies we found online. The design went through no less than a dozen iterations until we were satisfied with it.

Now, I am excited as the first version of the Unofficial Amman Transport Map will hit the streets and phone screens around the city. My enthusiasm for this project doesn’t just come from the collaborative process of its creation, and its potential to improve, if just a little bit, the experience of getting around in Amman. There is more.

For the first time we have a visual tool that enables us to see Amman’s transport system in its entirety. It unites us as Ammanis around one map that we can talk about and use as a tool to address the various authorities that oversee the system and are responsible for its future development.

Make no mistake: Amman’s transport system is badly broken. We have too few busses. Those we have are barely up to acceptable standards. We have no regular bus schedules. The bus stops on the street are there for decorative purposes. We don’t have a fair bus fare system, nor an easy way to pay. But at least we now have a map that we can point at and talk about.

A glimmer of hope might be the Bus Rapid Transit project, which has been delayed for too long. But what we need are immediate, tangible improvements in the existing system. And that’s were our unofficial map will help.

At SYNTAX we claim to design “transforming experiences”. We use the tools of research, observations, design thinking, branding, communication and technology to create experiences that inform, delight, teach and hopefully improve life.

I get nervous when I start anticipating the result of the countless hours of work put into this project, be it the work of volunteers, activists and us as designers. Will anyone care? Will people find it useful? Will it drive the conversation about the public transport in Amman forward? Will it make a contribution towards a more fair, friendly, usable, productive and enjoyable Amman?

That remains to be seen. This doesn’t stop here. The work of Maan Nasel is not done. It’s barely beginning. But the first step is to do something. Create a map. Get it released. Then see what happens.

You can download Amman’s Unofficial Public Transport Map from here: PDF, iOS, Android

100 Best Arabic Posters competition

Honored to have been chosen as jury member of the 100 Best Arabic Posters competition, held with the support of the German University in Cairo. Excited to see the entries soon.

If you have a great poster you want submit, then hurry up. The closing date is at the end of February. You just have a few days left!

100bap.com

“Uber-ize” this: it’s the customer experience, habibi!

Since Uber launched in the Jordanian capital Amman in 2015, an “Uberification” craze has swept over the country’s services scene. Everyone now wants to launch the “Uber of this” or the “Uber of that”. It’s understandable of course. Here, finally, was a service on our smart phones that was hugely useful.

I mean, just look at my family. Uber has been making a decent revenue from my teenage son, on one extreme of the age spectrum, and my mom, on the other extreme. My son always had trouble finding taxis in our part of the city. With the lack of a decent public transport system in Amman, he often had to rely on his mother and me to take him places. Uber solved his mobility problem. And we as parents felt safer with the Uber drivers than we felt when he was taking taxis.

My mother, on the other hand, has almost never taken a taxi in Amman in her entire life. She also doesn’t drive. Recently widowed, she has had to initially rely on family members to drive her somewhere. But to my surprise she embraced Uber and used it several time to come and visit us.

It’s a shame that we had to wait for US-based Uber to come and help us with some of our urban mobility problem here in Jordan. Yes, I know that EasyTaxi (another import) launched before Uber, but it seems it was never as reliable and consistent as Uber and thus never created the same kind of buzz in the market that Uber achieved.

Which brings me to the Uberification craze. At SYNTAX we have met several entrepreneurs who had an “Uber of X” idea that they wanted to get branded, designed and developed by us. Some of those ideas were great and others, well, not so much.

So before you embark on your Uber-like startup, stop for a minute and consider these questions:

1 Does Jordan (or your city/country/world) need you idea? In other words, what problem are you really solving. We’ve seen too many entrepreneurs in this part of the world who create solutions that are still looking for non-existent problems. Uber solved a real pain for people in Amman and many other cities. In Amman that pain was an underdeveloped, degraded taxi service. We’re taking dirty, unkempt cars, drivers who often don’t want to turn on the meter, who didn’t have change, or who simply refused to take you to a certain place. Uber came and gave us a more reliable, cleaner, more elegant way to order a ride, make a journey and pay for it. Look at how many pains it removed. That’s why people embraced it, even as it was more expensive than taxis. Before you fall in love with your own idea to create the “Uber of baby diaper delivery” maybe you should notice that buying diapers is not a big problem in your city, as every coronership sells them. Are you solving a real problem?

2 Are you thinking just about an App, or are creating a whole customer experience? At SYNTAX we always think about and observe customer experiences. Don’t get us started about the lack of great customer experiences in our region. Getting a website or an app right is not easy. But even if you have a good looking and properly functioning app, you’ve only taken one step towards success. When Uber launched in Jordan it created a model of service that delivers a good customer experience. Of course they had to deal with regulatory issues. They couldn’t just go with their US model where basically anyone could become an Uber driver, as that would be illegal in Jordan. They got decent drivers, provided them with decent cars, and then they launched their app. When we talk about touchpoints at SYNTAX we always emphasize to clients that they need to think about what touchpoint has the biggest impact on their business. When you want to launch the Uber of Falafel, make sure you can consistently make and deliver good falafel, before worrying about your mobile app.

3 Customer experience is the best marketing tool. If you solve a real problem for people, and then prove to them you can deliver the solution without driving them crazy, and when your all touchpoints have been well considered and designed, then congratulations, you have created a great customer experience. What will happen next is that you will have happy customers tweeting about it, telling their friends on Facebook and face to face too. That’s the best marketing you can get. It’s better than advertising and also better than gathering the “usual suspects” of “social media types” for a “tweetup” (or whatever it is called these days). By all means, advertise and do social media stuff, if you have the money and the time. But not before you get happy customers talking about the experience they had with your Uber of Falafel.

4 Are you ready to learn from your customers? A customer-centric mind set is more than just keeping the customer in mind when you first design your app, product of service. It also means that you are willing to learn from your customer’s behavior over time. When you initially launch your Uber of Falafel, or any app for that matter, take into consideration that you will need to tweak your offering over time, according to how people actually use it. Entrepreneurs often make the mistake of not budgeting enough time or money for the long haul. They are too focused on getting something out of the door. Well, more often than not, things do not work out they way you imagined. So you need to be ready to continuously improve your app, your communication and every touchpoint of your customer experience. The customers of you Uber of Falafel, may have problems with their credit cards. Or maybe the falafel are being delivered to them cold. Whatever. Such stuff will crop up. You need to listen, learn and tweak.

We at SYNTAX wish all the Uberification entrepreneurs the best of luck. Our region needs a million brilliant digitally-driven service to make our lives easier. But we also invite you to a chat about your next project. A customer-centric design conversation can add a lot of value to your next digital startup or corporate service.

Say hello to SYNTAX 3.0: Transforming Experiences

In May 2013, SYNTAX celebrated its 15th birthday. More than a birthday party we transformed the occasion into what we called SYNTAX/Interface: we opened our offices (and building roof) for a day of ideas, interaction and fun. Our invited speakers, clients, partners, SYNTAXers and ex-SYNTAXers, friends and family all showed up for what turned out to be a great, colorful day.

But it was also a day that signaled the end of an era and the beginning of another.

Technology has changed. The world has changed. We have changed.

Only a decade ago, it was a struggle to convince clients in the Arab region of the importance of a coherent brand, or the value of a web strategy, or, even more far fetched, the need to innovate.

Today, some of these challenges remain. But it is clear that our region is more connected than ever before. Connected internally, and globally. Our region is not immune to global competition nor to social and political change. And the region’s innovators are no longer invisible.

SYNTAX, a company that for more than a decade and a half preached design and innovation needs to redesign itself.

Our DNA of curiosity, clarity and craft has not changed. But the scope of what we deliver has progressively evolved.

A history lesson

When we started the company in the late 1990s, we tagged ourselves as providers of “strategic design and interactive media”, and that’s what we did during what I call SYNTAX 1.0. That mission was translated into building pioneering websites, corporate designs, logos and publications. Sometimes we provided comprehensive solutions, but often disconnected, one-off interventions.

SYNTAX 2.0 saw us evolve our strategic branding capabilities and expertise, as well as our involvement with web 2.0 startups. Besides branding companies, we now were branding larger corporations, cities and regions.

Today, we’re increasingly designing backdrop businesses from the ground up: Product strategy, brand, technology, communication, user interface, space are more than just interconnected. They are one!

In parallel to this evolution, our team grew, not merely in numbers. It is the growth that comes from long term collaborative learning and the trust built between people who have been together through tough challenges and hard-won achievements for many years. In a world where job hopping has become the norm, many of us SYNTAXers have been here for 5 years or more. Some, a decade and more. Equally, I am it is the growth that comes from new members of our team who are adding exciting dimensions to our expertise and culture.

Everyone: welcome to SYNTAX 3.0.

Remembering why we’re here

Beyond all the buzzwords and trends, beyond consultant’s presentations, we see our role as designers addressing some deep-rooted human needs: Communication. Knowledge. Tools. Space. Place. Identity.

Humans are a tool-making and tool-using species. From the stone hammer to the smartphone. We keep evolving our tools, making them better, redesigning them.

We are a species that communicates. The better communicators thrive.

We all need identities to “identify”. From our personal identity (who am I) to the identity of communities, cities, companies, organizations. Having an identity means standing for something.

We are a learning species. The gathering, organization, transmission and development of knowledge is central to human culture. Any system that stops learning, dies.

We are a space dwelling species: from caves to skyscrapers. From the village to the metropolis. Our relation to the spaces we dwell in and travel through is central to the living and understanding of our lives.

The best we can hope for at SYNTAX is to help people, communities and organization by designing better tools, communication and knowledge, spaces, places and identities.

How it’s done at SYNTAX

We favor designing and building things over talking about them. We are visual. We are tactile. We are experiential. We show and tell. We prototype the future to see how it looks and if it really works. We aren’t afraid to make “mistakes” as we iterate towards a solution that works elegantly.

We challenge the status quo, and don’t care about departmental politics. We don’t care if it “was always done this way”. We don’t care if it “can’t be done”.

We are not just “design nerds”. Yes we deeply care about obscure design details of materials, fonts, pixels and shades of color. But we are also passionately curious about real-world business challenges and how organizations work and how people use products, perceive information, interact with their environments and how they feel about the experiences they have.

Transforming your business through Experiential Integration

The best organizations and companies are the ones that can consistently offer their audiences experiences that respond to their needs, that add to their lives and that ultimately delight them in small and large ways.

People experience your organziation through a series of interfaces. These interfaces include the products you sell, the services you provide, the communication you transmit, the physical spaces and the digital platforms where they interact with you.

Designing those interfaces in a holistic, connected and thoughtful manner to deliver experiences that are easy, intuitive, beautiful, meaningful and delightful is what we call Experiential Integration.

“Transforming Experiences” is our guiding idea today. It not only means that we have the technical ability to transform an experience. It challenges us to create experiences transform perceptions, opinions, usage, engagement, profits, relevance. A great meal can transform your mood. A great teaching experience delivered by a passionate teacher can transform a child. A great transport experience can transform the lives of citizens. A great travel experience can transform the understanding the world and your place in it.

A window into our world

With these thoughts, I invite you to have a look at our new website to see more of what we’ve bee up to. We hope it sparks an idea. Maybe we’ll be working together soon to transform an experience.

syntaxdesign.com