Hey all,

First, we appreciate you for being here. Let us tell you our story and mission and we hope that you consider supporting the project.

Our story

Our journey started in 2020, when we began taking mobile photos (on an old iPhone 6s, it was not great) of book covers we found while strolling through the streets of Cairo. We would share them with the few hundred followers we had at the time and rejoice at the handful of likes we received.

As we continued, more people started to follow and engage with the project. With that came a growing sense of responsibility and a clear realization of how important it is to document and preserve Arab design history. That is when we decided to move beyond the limits of social media posts and try to give this history the kind of documentation it truly deserves.

We applied for funding, big and small. After a long and tough journey full of challenges, growth, learning, and a lot of unpaid work, we were able to amass more than 8,000 items (and counting), ranging from posters and books to flyers, brochures, films, and other printed ephemera. Over a period of five years, we received four grants that helped us get to where we are now.

All of these efforts culminated in The Arabic Design Archive Platform: the first open and accessible digital archive focused on preserving Arab design history. At the moment, the website hosts a little over 10 percent of our total collection. The rest still needs a lot of careful work before it can be uploaded and shared with the public.

What we need to continue?

To keep this work going, we need financial support to cover three main areas in 2026:

1. Website maintenance and development

For a website as complex and expansive as ours, technical assistance from our web developers is essential. Your support will help us:

2. Uploading new items

To turn digitized material into something searchable and usable, we rely on metadata specialists. They are the experts who:

This is slow, detailed work that requires expertise and many hours of focused effort. We want to compensate these people as fairly as we can for their time and knowledge.

3. Managing the project

For everything to come together, someone needs to:

This role is essential for the project’s survival and, like the others, it deserves to be paid.

Why your support matters

The Arabic Design Archive is a non-profit project. Access to our materials is free, and we want to keep it that way. We do not gate keep, and we advocate for free and open access to all. For that to happen funding.

Your contribution will:

If you use, teach with, research through, or simply enjoy the archive, think of your contribution as a long term investment in a shared cultural resource.

Cultural productions rarely get funded sustainably by institutions, so we heavily depend on our community of followers to sustain us and in return we will keep making our collections available for people to study, analyze, use for scholarship, or simply be inspired to create amazing work.

What we are raising and how it breaks down

To sustain the platform for the next calendar year, we need 5000 Euros for:

Any amount helps, whether small or large.

By helping us cover this year’s costs, you give us the breathing space to focus on building more long term sustainability solutions. This is vital to our ability to exist and to keep the archive freely available for our community in the years to comeA side note: last year we did the same campaign and we had issues processing the funds because we are based in Egypt, and refunded everyone who donated back then, this year we are helped by a friend of ours to raise nexts years fund.

How you can help

Thank you for reading, for supporting, and even simply for caring. We appreciate you, regardless of whether you are able to donate or not.