Interview
An identity drawn from tide tables and berth numbers
Harbour Line's designer on finding a system inside an operations manual.
2 min read
Interview · April 30, 2026
Watch the interview
Harbour Line was a ferry operator with no brand and a very complete operations manual. The identity came out of the manual rather than out of a moodboard.
A regional award, judged regionally
The programme exists because work made in Amman, Cairo, Riyadh, Dubai and Casablanca was being measured against criteria written somewhere else, for a market with different constraints, different scripts and different production.
That does not mean a softer standard. It means the standard is written where the work is made, and that a jury reading an entry knows what a two-week print turnaround or a bilingual signage brief actually costs.
An archive, not a season
Every edition stays addressable after its year closes. A finalist from an earlier cycle keeps their page, their groups and their count, because a reference that disappears when the next cycle opens is not a reference.
That is the part the region was missing: not another prize, but a record designers can point at years later when they are asked what good work here looked like.
About this conversation
The conversation was recorded for the programme and edited for length. The full transcript is above the related posts, so nothing said here depends on being able to play the film.
Transcript
The film is edited for length. This is what was said.
On what the brief actually asked
Harbour Line was a ferry operator with no brand and a very complete operations manual. The identity came out of the manual rather than out of a moodboard.
The constraint was the useful part. Once it was written down properly, most of the options disappeared on their own and what was left was arguable rather than arbitrary.
On entering
Read the sub-category before the deadline, not after. The group decides which of the four criteria carry weight, and strong work loses every year for being entered where its strengths are not counted.
