Omar Shammah, Syrian artist
Born in Damascus, Syria in 1992
Lives in Bremen, Germany
Omar Shammah is a young (graphic) designer who studied visual communication (graphic design) at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Damascus. His achievements include several successful graphic design projects. Omar Shammah has lived in Bremen, Germany, since the end of 2015.
In 2012, at the height of the Syrian conflict, Omar created a troubling but bewitchingly beautiful series of drawings in his INKED .Sketchbook.
In his typographic project entitled Alphabet Town, Omar uses the letters of the alphabet to build different types of dwellings, with .gif animations running from A to Z. All his designs were first created on paper using charcoal and ink, before being refined and animated into .gifs with Adobe Photoshop.
This was the basis used for his illustrated “caps typeface” entitled Blowjob. As early as 2012, Omar was also developing a set of signal icons for the Faculty of Fine Arts in Damascus. In 2013, he created the “straight-edged typeface” POV, and in 2015 designed Steven for Blanc Marc, a marketing agency from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Omar Shammah, a portrait (Text by Khaled Youssef)
Bespectacled and laughing eyes that tell a myriad of stories, a broad and high forehead that radiates intelligence and sensitivity. While observing him drawing, it is impossible to avert one’s gaze away from his hand running with lightness and elegance over the white page, drawing on intimate sources of his being to draw the Universal that affects us all. Despite his undoubted talent as a visual artist, he gives priority to another art form in which he also excels: Graphic Design. The ideas of this graphic designer rush to create creative forms to his projects, and thus it is also in Europe that his creativity will be deployed.
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