Sharjah Children's Reading Festival

The Sharjah Children's Reading Festival is the children's literacy event run under the Sharjah Book Authority, the sister programme to the Sharjah International Book Fair. I designed the homepage twice, six years apart: the **6th edition in 2013**, and a complete redesign for the **11th edition, held 17 to 27 April 2019**.

The two commissions are effectively two different briefs. In 2013 the festival needed a site that established it as a substantial cultural programme in its own right, distinct from the book fair. By 2019 the festival was established, and the problem had inverted: the site needed to feel current against a completely changed set of web conventions without discarding the personality audiences already recognised.

The recurring difficulty across both editions is that **a children's event site has to be playful without becoming juvenile**. Push too far toward children and the site loses the parents and teachers who make the actual decision, and it undermines the government body funding it. Pull too far toward institutional and the festival looks like an administrative programme rather than something a child would want to attend.

Underneath that, each edition had its own problem.

**The 2013 edition** expresses the festival's identity through colour and Arabic letterform. A multi-colour palette of purple, green, orange, and pink runs across the page over a soft patterned background, with a circular bilingual festival mark as the centrepiece of the header. Programme areas, Activities, Exhibitors, the Illustrator programme, and Guests, become colour-coded tiles down the right rail, each with its own colour, imagery, and route.

The most important move was using **Arabic letterforms as large decorative graphics** inside those tiles rather than treating Arabic as a translation layer. The bilingual identity becomes art direction, which matters for an event whose subject is reading in Arabic. The hero overlays its message inside a green circle rather than a conventional banner, keeping the geometry soft and childlike. Photography leads with children actually reading.

Being asked to redesign your own work six years later is the most useful review you can get. Nothing else forces you to separate what was identity from what was merely current. In 2013 the pattern, ribbons, and circular devices felt like the festival's character; by 2019 it was obvious that the character lived in the colour system and the Arabic letterforms, and the rest was just what websites looked like in 2013. I now try to ask that question while designing rather than six years afterward: which of these decisions would still be right if every convention changed.

Continuity is carried by fewer things than you expect. Going into the redesign I assumed keeping recognition would require preserving a good deal of the original. In practice the colour-to-programme mapping and the letterforms did almost all of it, plus a confetti strip at the foot of the page that costs nothing and quietly signals the same event. Identity turns out to be a small number of load-bearing elements, and knowing which ones they are is what makes a redesign safe.