Saudi Gazette JEDDAH — Three of Dar Al-Hekma University's faculty members won the prestigious A' Design awards. This international competition gives fame to individual designers for their efforts and creates a buzz about their work and achievements in design. This annual juried opportunity acknowledges a variety of designers, from architects and engineers to professional and student designers. The competition awards winning designs in a variety of categories. Two motion graphics lecturers, Madiha Jamil and Madiha Rana, won in animation and design categories. While the graphic design lecturer Lama Ajeenah won in the graphic and visual communication category. There were a total of 15,000 project submissions for the competition this year. Cordula Peters, the chair of Visual Communication Department in Dar Al-Hekma University, served on the jury of the A' Design awards this year. Peter's contribution to the organization helped to oversee and judge thousands of submissions. The work of all three winners will be on display in Italy later this year. "This was the second time I have served as a jury member for the A' Design awards and it has been a great honor. Being a jury member for this competition has given me a chance to better understand the sheer numbers of entries submitted in each category each year and the high standard of quality of work. This makes me even prouder to see our faculty members and alumnae win awards in this competition. This is the third year in a row that we had a Dar Al-Hekma alumna win an award at A' Design Awards," said Peters. Jamil won a bronze medal in Computer Graphics and 3D Model Design for her project "La'Hore", a Punjabi word that means "Get More". Her models were created to celebrate Pakistan's 1960s movie scene. Jamil wanted to mold characters that would appeal to both the older nostalgic generation and the young people who are fond of 3D motion graphics aesthetic popular in film today. "Everything in the scene was created to capture "the rich culture of Lahore" while incorporating the "60s era" to depict the culture, fashion and social behaviors," said Jamil. Jamil shared that the most challenging part of her project was capturing the personality of the actors in her modeled characters. "My characters are inspired from real legendry actors, the biggest challenge was to design the character which should resemble the actors yet stylized to make them appealing for younger audience," she added. When Jamil was satisfied in achieving the goals of creating the actors' resemblances she felt that her work was complete. The second winner, Rana, won an Iron design prize, now called an A' Design award, in the Movie and Animation Design category for her work "Truck Art Video Documentary" which covers the nearly 100-year-old Pakistani tradition of painting trucks. Filmed in Qusar, a small town in Pakistan, the narrator in Rana's video explains that the craft of decorating and painting trucks involves creativity, imagination, cultural understanding and aesthetic skills. The film showed that truck art is quite an involved process. The filming of the Pakistani truck art documents the process of painting as it also records the designers and clients who are interviewed to explain how they make trucks beautiful. The last Dar Al-Hekma University's faculty winner was Ajeenah who was a second time participant in A' Design Award. Ajeenah was awarded another Iron, or A' Design Award, in Graphic and Visual Communication Design for her submission of a personal identity called "A Writer Experience". She was the recipient of two Iron awards in the 2013 competition. This year, guided by her client Dr. Shaymaa Al-Sharif's interests in Spanish culture, specifically in Gaudi's artwork, and Dr. Al-Sharif's Saudi background, Ms. Ajeenah created a design using Illustrator and Photoshop. The personal identity portrays the writer who is inspired and influenced by her surroundings, locally and internationally. The work is rendered with bright colors, strong outline and a mosaic inspired aesthetic in an effort to symbolize the cultural inspiration of the writer along with fiction book writing.
