Ramadan Greetings

I’ve noticed sometimes I get more creative when there’s no brief. When I have creative freedom to, basically, do what I want.

I was working for developer Kleindienst when they asked me for a social media post to celebrate the beginning of Ramadan. To give some context, Kleindienst is known for developing the first underwater floating villa in Dubai. It’s called the Floating Seahorse and it’s their flagship development and it’s also part of a bigger resort called The Heart of Europe, where you can do a plethora of activities that involve water, as this is set in the middle of the Arabian Gulf 7km off the coast of Dubai. One of these activities will be diving and you can go down to explore coral reefs, sea animals, etc

Having said that, I don’t feel like I really need to explain my design. But for those still wondering, since the whole experience of the Floating Seahorse was built around the underwater living spaces, obviously I thought the opportunity was more than ideal to play around with something that included and happened underwater. The short story is: I saw this idea in my head and one day, when I wasn’t very busy, I went ahead and started designing what you see above.

The long story is it took me a good couple of weeks to come up with this design. Not necessarily because I was blocked, I could see the artwork very vividly in my head, I just didn’t know how to go about it. I had a few chats with who was my manager then, and his bright ideas weren’t really bright for me. So I locked myself up and starting working on this, bit by bit, pixel by pixel.

I knew the scene had to happen underwater so I started digging for some underwater images from stock libraries. I then started touching up the best ones I found - and the ones I thought looked closer to the image I had in my head. Then added all the coral, a bit faded in as to not be too distracting from the main scene.

Then the hard work really happened. I wasn’t sure what the main scene was going to be. Initially, it was just going to be random fish swimming around with a diver. But of course that’s even more boring than a 9-6! From the beginning I didn’t want to be obvious with the social post. Most companies go ahead and post a generic half moon with starts that they found in the most popular stock libraries.

Then I had that eureka moment. Or maybe not, you’ll decide. Maybe I joined the group of cliche companies.

In the Muslim world, the beginning of every month is based on the state of the moon. So the month of Ramadan is no exception and the start of that month is dictated by the moon. This is why most Ramadan artworks have a moon and some starts to compliment the composition. So here’s my idea for the scene: A diver from The Heart of Europe, who in one of his explorations finds a school of fish roaming around the resort. As he gets closer to the fish, they get scared and swim around him. Producing, of course, what you can see in my final composition.

The diver - or the fish - don’t know this, but seen from afar, it looks like the fish are forming a half moon around the diver as he gets closer. What a coincidence! And during the month of Ramadan? It has to be pure coincidence.

Of course, I’m only joking. But you can see how some time of boredom in the office can turn into something very productive.

I said hard work before, because I had to cut fish by fish to get to the point where they all look as if they’re surrounding the diver. Adding shadows, making sure the size is right, adding curves, etc. It wasn’t impossible, but it did take some time. And surely this is not a bad thing, I had a lot of fun doing this and as I was doing I was more motivated to refine all the details.

We started with no brief or intention of what to post on social media to mark the beginning of Ramadan. As the nature of the artwork is quite usual, it got the attention of more people than normal on social media. We generated more likes and comments than on an average day and got more people to join the crowd of followers. All because of one image, a designed photograph, with a compelling message tailor made with a combination of the company values and the context at the time.

Another example of the power of well-thought design.

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