In late 2017, The Egyptian Ministry of Culture announced a competition for designing the official poster for "Cairo Book Fair", in its 49th round in January 2018; an annual event that is organised by the Ministry's "General Egyptian Book Organisation" (GEBO).
The announcement was in Arabic, and stated all the information needed, such as: prizes, delivery, dimensions,... and also the important elements to be present in the advertisement material; as the poster was meant to be the main template for the advertisement, with the designed elements are to able to be copied on other templates of different dimensions.
(L-R) Guest country of Honour: Algeria, the organising body's logo: GEBO, and the year's key character to celebrate: the late Egyptian author Abd-Al-Rahman Al-Sharqawy.
My main idea was setting a design with many elements but the passerby (especially the motorists) can receive quickly the most important notes in about 2-3 seconds, and in both Arabic (the native language) and English.
The 1st step was setting the elements in their respective suitable position in a functional order. Notice the insertion of the theme sentence between large quotation marks, and the settling on the character "و" for the connecting conjunction, in Arabic, instead of adding its English counterpart "and" or "&"; due to its sufficiently-expressive drawing. The order, change in typography, and adding dividers was similar to the old advertisements; which depended on a similar concept.
(Left): The 1st real try. This was while the concept of the order was being developed, and with part of the Egyptian map in the background (like I said: just a try!).
(Right): The 2nd try was beginning to settle on an order and weight for each element, and the start for adding colours in specific weights to serve the "element weight".
The 3rd try was a continuation of the colour weight idea, while making the background clearer. The version on the right started to add a missing "books" element for the "book" fair.
The 4th and final try was adding a row of books instead of the previous yellow patch, and replacing it in the background with the Rosetta Stone; to add both "Egyptian", "reading", and "history of culture" links to the Fair.
The colour palette that was used for the design elements in the foreground, in weights that parallels the elements' design weights in the poster.
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