SHAREK (to share) - We believe that language and culture are better shared than taught

Yousef Omar is a well respected professor of Arabic language and culture with a long career of teaching Arabic studies at SOAS in London. He was becoming more and more frustrated with the out-dated methods of teaching Arabic until one day he reached breaking point. Yousef turned away from the recognised Arabic teaching world and decided to cut his own path.

Yousef wanted to create a new way of learning Arabic language and culture, where people learned by sharing in a group rather than being taught in isolation. A new style of education centre where students were encouraged to learn together in a group about Arabic languages, dialects, cultures, foods, drinks, smells, tastes, sounds etc.

SERVICES:
• Brand strategy
• Brand name
• Visual identity
• Website
• Investor decks
• Print 
• Video
• Animation
• Illustration
• Interiors (direction)

Yousef came to us with just the bare bones of an idea. Our first task was to help him choose a name for his new venture. During the brand workshop with Yousef and his team the main topic of conversation was focused on the challenge of finding a new way of ‘sharing’ Arabic language and culture. Sharing was the key word of the workshop and with the help of Google Translate we discovered that the verb ‘to share’ translates into ‘sharek’.

The Sharek brand is all about people of all ages, gender, race, religion, beliefs and backgrounds coming together to ‘share’ knowledge and experiences. To learn and grow together as a group. The key to success for this new way of learning is interaction and open dialogue between everyone. We created a new brand identity that took this basic concept of dialogue and brought it to life with the use of speech marks icons. The speech mark icons are used to construct the logo and then abstracted to create the brand visual language.

The new brand identity is made up of a small selection of different assets that includes the speech mark icons, Helvetica Neue Arabic font, colours inspired by Arabic mosaic tiles, hand-sketched illustrations and candid photos of people interacting as a group. We wanted to give the brand a very young, fun and approachable look and feel as some Arabic language schools in the UK appear to be older, more serious and not always open to new ideas.  

Yousef needed the new brand identity completed asap so it could be applied to a new website holding page and business cards for a key meeting with his primary investor. The meeting went well and he received the funding to continue building the brand. We then designed and crafted the full website (inspired by the functionality of Tumblr) with a bespoke bookings platform that we hand-built with one of our Wordpress developers. 

The next step was to create a marketing content and activation plan for advertising and social to raise awareness of the new Sharek brand in and around London. 

The first marketing campaign for Sharek was just focused on visualising the simple concept of sharing with a basic call to action, website address and logo (with a translation of the word Sharek). Nothing complicated, just keeping it simple, as most language school ads did the opposite and included information about every possible course and timetable. The ads were designed to be placed inside the tube network with Exterion Media, TFL, taxis, street posters, and in print and online with The Guardian and The London Evening Standard. We also created a series of simple flyers and leaflets.

Our next challenge was to find new ways of sharing the brand with people who didn’t have time to sit down and read the website. We created six animated short films that were posted on the website and social media, each film brought to life a different aspect of the brand. 

The last piece of the jigsaw was to help Yousef with interior design art direction for the new Sharek Centre in central London (just around the corner from SOAS). 

SHAREK UPDATE SEP 2023: everything was moving in the right direction for Yousef, his team and investors until the education industry was hit hard by the pandemic. Yousef pivoted and took the Sharek concept in a new direction with ETQAAN - a new online Arabic learning platform based in Dubai with a brand strategy, name, visual identity and website created by us.