Font of a Nation: Creating a National Graphic Identity for Qatar
Even before he graduated from the School of Visual Arts’ master of fine arts design program in New York, Tarek Atrissi had scored a solo exhibition at Virginia Commonwealth University. This is not the Virginia Commonwealth University in Virginia, mind you, but rather its School of the Arts nearly seven thousand miles away in Doha, Qatar. The show generated press that attracted the attention of the Qatar Tourism Authority (QTA), a state-run agency created in 2000 under decree of the emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani and chaired by the chief executive officer of Qatar Airways. The QTA, placing a great deal of faith in this young but worldly designer, offered him a weighty commission: to develop a new “corporate” identity for the nation.
Qatar, independent from Britain only since 1971, had a logo already, but “it had everything,” Atrissi (2006) said in conversation with me. “It had the palm tree and the camel and the sand dunes” — every Middle Eastern cliché in the book. Qatar, roughly the size of Connecticut and, at the time of Atrissi’s commission, virtually unheard of outside the region, was about to launch a massive program of infrastructural development and diplomacy. If this was to be its global cotillion, it would have to find something to wear.
Atrissi, a native of Lebanon, moved to Qatar for a year to get a sense of what defined the country and differentiated it from its neighboring nations. When he asked people, mostly nonnationals, what occurred to them when they thought of Qatar, most said, simply, that they didn’t. People rarely had preconceived notions — either positive or negative — about the country, yet “the fact that Qatar did not have an existing national identity made [my job] easier” ( Atrissi 2006). “Young nations are in a unique position to brand themselves,” writes branding consultant Fiona Gilmore (2002: 282), “because they are at an early stage of development and may not have acquired any negative perceptions or associations.” For these young nations, the process of establishing a national brand could present an ideal opportunity for the nation to catalog its assets and core values and to determine what the nation means, both to nationals and to those outside its borders. We might assume that only nations unburdened with centuries or millennia of history, nations that do not stretch across thousands of miles of territory or harbor heterogeneous publics and vast socioeconomic complexity, can consider these questions — can conceive of designing a national brand. Yet in recent years even Spain, India, and Great Britain have tried.
Gilmore (2002: 283) proposes that in branding “it may be useful to think of some of these smaller countries almost as large multinationals.” The idea of “branding” a nation could be distasteful to those who regard a nation as something more than a business or product in need of positioning and packaging (see Olins 2002: 241). Although the branding terminology might be relatively new (and, some might say, already passé), the practice — fashioning a collection of perceptions, making promises, about an object or entity — is not.1 For millennia, political and religious authorities, minters and flag makers, composers, authors and filmmakers, and architects and urban planners have been responsible for creating and transmitting national identities, and their work has been studied by scholars in fields ranging from history to cinema studies to political science.2
Atrissi, starting with a blank slate, chose to forgo the clever icons and mascots that global brands often adopt in an attempt to overcome language barriers. Instead he focused on one symbol to which Qatar clearly holds exclusive rights: its name.3 Through typography and color Atrissi permits that name — featured twice on the logo, in Arabic script and in Latin letters — to “read” differently, to evoke differently, for its various audiences. Given the centrality of calligraphy to Islamic culture and its prominence among the Islamic arts, it seems fitting that the written word should be at the center of this Islamic nation’s self-definition and selfrepresentation (see Welch 1979). Given the vital role that a shared language plays in defining and holding together a nation, according to many scholars of nationalism (see Fishman 1973; Gellner 1983; Anderson 1991; Billig 1995; Hastings 1997), it seems appropriate that the name of a nation — not only the word itself, but also its presentation — should serve as an effective binding force. Yet the word in the logo functions also as the image, enabling a non-Arabic-speaking audience to engage with the logo nonsemantically, to appreciate it as an aesthetic object.
However, this polysemic logo struggles to represent Qatar both internally and externally, to encompass otherness within and without the state’s borders, and to reinforce both the history, values, religion, and language it shares with other Arab countries and, simultaneously, the commitment to progressive development that aligns it with the West. The contradictions ultimately prove too much for a typeface — and even for the nation — to sustain. Instead of grappling with its own contradictions, including its ethnic diversity and political disparity, Qatar “manages” these social problems, “domesticates” its differences. What is being branded is not a nation but a marketing-driven entity circulating amid flows of labor, capital, and image — the nation fetishized.4 The state, depoliticized and incorporated, is ostensibly fashioning itself into a corporation with a clearly defined set of local and global stakeholders. Qatar is thus something “beyond the nation” ( Chatterjee 1998).
End of Excerpt | Access Full Version
Notes
I am indebted to Tarek Atrissi for his inspiration and generosity and to Michael Golec, Jaeho Kang, Barry Salmon, Jilly Traganou, and the organizers and participants of the 2007 Logo Cities conference at Reyerson University for their comments on an early draft of this work. Thanks also to Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, Ron Jennings, and the editorial committee of Public Culture for their guidance.
- Advertiser David Ogilvy (1963: 100), whom some credit with developing the concept of branding, defines a brand as, simply, “a complex symbol,” an “intangible sum” of a product’s qualities or characteristics. Branding is thus the fashioning of that symbol — the practice of manipulating these variables so that they coalesce as an “intangible sum” that creates a lasting impression and promotes loyalty.
- In 2002 the Journal of Brand Management dedicated an entire issue to nation branding. The editor of that special issue, Simon Anholt, launched Place Branding and Public Diplomacy, an academic journal on the subject, in 2004.
- The name-as-logo recalls Theodor W. Adorno’s (1991: 48) reference, in “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” to the “What we want is Watney’s” billboard, on which “the wares masquerade as a slogan.”
- Appadurai (1996) also discusses the fetishization of both cultural production and consumption that results from the globalization of culture.
