Dar Wa Emaar
– Brand Identity & Digital
Experience
A new brand identity and mobile digital experience,
Dar Wa Emaar
CREDITS
AKQA
MY ROLE
Brand Identity
UI Design
Digital Experience
Visual Identity
MORE INFO
Dar Wa Emaar is a Saudi Arabian real estate and investment company with residential communities across Riyadh, Dammam, Khobar, Jeddah and Madinah. They approached AKQA with an ambitious brief to redesign their mobile app experience and website in a way that felt genuinely modern, timeless and premium. What made this brief unusual was the specific direction they wanted to move toward: the restraint and clarity of Scandinavian design, applied to a brand with deep roots in Arabic heritage and culture.
I led the creative direction and design execution for the premium version of this project alongside another designer, with the ECD overseeing our work. What started as a focused digital brief became an opportunity to think about the brand more holistically with exploring how a visual identity could hold both worlds at once without compromising either one.
When the Arabic heritage meets Nordic minimalism
MY CONTRIBUTION
Working alongside one other designer with the ECD overseeing the project, I owned the premium version of the design including responsible for the full creative direction, visual identity exploration and digital screen design. The brief asked for modern and Scandinavian.
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PREMIUM DIGITAL EXPERIENCE
Led the premium version of the mobile and web experience — desktop landing page and mobile screens including homepage, PDP and contact page.
ARABIC HERITAGE MEETS NORDIC MINIMALISM
Found the bridge between two cultures in the brand's own calligraphic logotype, developing it into a graphic system specific to Dar Wa Emaar.
BRAND IDENTITY EXPANSION
Explored the calligraphic element as a pattern across stationery with sand texture grounding the Nordic palette in the Saudi landscape.
COLOR PALETTE
The colour system was built to do two things at once; distinguish the premium and accessible premium design approaches, while staying true to the brand's Saudi roots. Taupe brown, white sand and dark charcoal form the premium palette: warm, restrained, grounded in the desert landscape the brand actually lives in. Maroon, navy and mint green give the accessible version a different emotional register aspirational without being exclusive. Same brand logic, different worlds.
BRAND IDENTITY
The premium brand identity palette in use across stationery. The brand's existing orange sits against deep charcoal and warm white, a combination that references terracotta and shadow without feeling decorative. Every touchpoint was designed to feel like it belonged to the same family, so a business card and a landing page could sit side by side and neither one would need to explain itself.
“The brief said Scandinavian, so I found it in the Arabic letterform.”
DESIGN DECISIONS
The client asked for Scandinavian minimalism, which could have meant almost anything. Clean layouts, restrained typography, a lot of white space, these are easy to do and easy to forget. What I was more interested in was finding the thing inside the Dar Wa Emaar brand that was already minimal, already precise, already confident. The Arabic calligraphic logotype turned out to be exactly that. There was geometry in those letterforms that didn't need to be imposed from outside, it was already there, waiting to be expanded into something.
The two audience versions — premium and accessible premium — were differentiated through colour and imagery rather than structure, because the underlying brand logic had to feel coherent across both. The premium version used the brand's existing orange alongside dark tones and warm beige, creating a palette that felt wealthy without being aggressive. The accessible version introduced a fresh mint against dark backgrounds, targeting a younger buyer who wanted to feel like they were stepping into something aspirational rather than something exclusive.
EDITORIAL BOOK DESIGN
The editorial layout for the property brochure, designed to let the photography do the work. Using generous white space, a restrained serif type system and minimal graphic interruption keep the focus on the homes themselves.
BOOK COVERS & TOTE BAG
The book covers use the mint green palette alongside the Arabic calligraphy taken directly from the brand logotype, the same letterforms that anchor the whole visual system, scaled up and treated as pure graphic matter. The tote bag takes a single glyph from the icon system and lets it fill the surface, which turns a functional object into something that is unmistakably Dar Wa Emaar.
SHAPES / ICONS DEVELOPMENT
Exploration shapes from the brand logo to develop a burger menu, arrows and icons uses for across the digital designs
SPLASH / LAUNCH SCREEN
The launch screen is designed to give an immediate sense of the brand before anything else loads. The custom glyphs developed from the logo's geometry serve as navigation icons across the app by giving the interface a visual language that is specific to Dar Wa Emaar rather than borrowed from a generic icon library.
THE HOMEPAGE DESKTOP & MOBILE
The homepage leads with the architecture. A full-bleed hero image, restrained navigation and minimal typography let the property speak before any copy does. The layout was designed to establish the premium register in the first few seconds, not through complexity, but through exactly the right amount of space and exactly the right amount of restraint. The mobile version carries the same logic without compromise.
It's about finding what's already there, then develop the core design
IMPACT
The ECD responded positively to the creative direction and the client engaged warmly with the design proposals. The work demonstrated that a Saudi brand could pursue international design ambitions without losing the cultural specificity that makes it distinctive. The brand identity exploration shown here represents both the pitch work completed at AKQA and a continued self-initiated expansion of the visual system developed afterward.
REFLECTION
Brand design at this scale isn't about making something look expensive, it is about finding the thing that is genuinely specific to a brand and building a system around it that could only belong to that brand. The Arabic calligraphic element was always there in the Dar Wa Emaar identity. My job was to see it, trust it and develop it into something that could carry the whole visual world.
Working with two cultural references that might have seemed contradictory — Arabic heritage and Nordic minimalism — turned out to be the most creatively interesting constraint I have worked with. The tension between them wasn't a problem to resolve. It was the brief.
SINGLE MOBILE SCREEN
The premium PDP mobile screen, shown in the environment it was designed for.
ONE BRAND, TWO AUDIENCES
The premium and accessible premium versions side by side, both shot against the same sand environment to show they come from the same place. The premium screen uses warm beige, restrained brown and editorial typography. The accessible premium version shifts to a darker, cooler palette with higher contrast the same structural logic, recalibrated for a younger buyer who wants to feel like they are entering something new rather than something established.
PDP SEQUENCE
The product detail page across three states with introduction, overview and floor plan. The first screen leads with the brand's vision statement, setting the emotional register before any specifications appear. The second gives the buyer a way to orient themselves with imagery, key details, a clear call to action. The third presents the apartment layout and drawing plan with enough space and clarity that someone making one of the biggest decisions of their life isn't made to work for the information. The design follows the decision, not the other way around.