A female digital artist in Egypt has found a way to preserve cultural heritage through design.
Graphic artist Ghada Wali became the first Egyptian woman to be featured on the Forbes 30 under 30 list.
The 27-year-old award-winner has designed a 21st-century Arabic dictionary called ‘Let’s Play’, which is inspired by the need to preserve her identity and heritage.
The dictionary features Arabic letters in all forms.
“It’s in the form of a dictionary, or book, that features every letter in all its forms, because Arabic is very hard, there are four different versions for letters at the beginning of the word, the middle of the word, and end of the word. It’s not like Latin or English where you have only one letter used in all situations. So the book features the letter, its sound, its shape, a word featuring the letter, and the equivalent of the word in Latin. So it’s a book with Legos so you could feel the structure of the letter while learning it. We need solutions in different areas because our language is getting extinct and our heritage is also becoming extinct,” Wali said.
‘Let’s Play’ is still a prototype, and Wali is working on producing it for real-life educational purposes.
If successful, the project could be translated and applied to various languages around the world.
