Iraq 100

What is Iraq 100?

Iraq 100 marked the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Iraqi republic. Initiated by the distinguished Iraqi architect Ahmed Al-Mallak under the Tamayouz Excellence Award, the exhibition toured internationally, showing in Baghdad, Paris, London, Amman, and Coventry.

The brief covered the full logo suite, the visual identity system, and the official poster design in both Arabic and English. A hundred years is a specific kind of milestone, long enough to carry real weight, short enough that the people who lived through parts of it are still around to see how it's told.

The challenge

Iraq 100 wasn't a static exhibition of pre-selected work, it was the inaugural edition of what became Tamayouz's recurring International Poster Competition, an open call inviting artists, designers, photographers, and students worldwide to submit original posters under the "100 Years of Modern Iraq" theme. That meant the identity had two separate jobs. First, as a call for entries, it needed visual authority to invite artists to participate and submit their work. Second, once submissions were judged and selected, that same identity had to travel as consistent exhibition branding across five culturally distinct cities and still read as the same serious, unmistakably Iraqi event in every one of them.

Capturing the essence of a hundred years of Iraq was never going to be straightforward. The country had witnessed an extraordinary range of change across that century, and no single symbol could claim to represent all of it without oversimplifying, or worse, misrepresenting what that history actually held. It needed a symbol old enough to belong to the whole span of that century, not just a slice of it.

The logo's story

The mark is built on the palm frond, a symbol tied to Iraq since the ancient art and ornament of Babylon, roughly 4,000 years B.C. reading clearly even to audiences unfamiliar with Iraqi symbolism. It works independent of language, holds up from a wall projection to a business card, and draws from four thousand years rather than one era or city. It gave the identity a form specific to Iraq's own visual history, rather than to any single era of it.

The color carries its own piece of the story. Tamayouz, the excellence award behind the exhibition, is recognized by its distinctive orange and Arabic typography. Keeping that same orange inside the frond kept Iraq 100 visibly connected to the organization behind it.

The mark & its lockups

The frond sits inside a solid orange disc, close enough to a stamp or a seal to feel official without needing a border to say so. From there, the system holds a horizontal lockup for wide formats and a stacked mark for anything closer to square, so the identity never has to be squeezed to fit.

Color & pattern exploration

With the orange fixed, the frond pattern itself was tested as a standalone texture, in solid orange on charcoal, in cream on charcoal, and reversed, checking that the linework still read clearly at every combination before it was allowed onto print and signage.

The official poster

The poster carried the identity into its own separate composition, an oversized outline wordmark, the exhibition's call for entries, and the five host cities listed by date, holding together in one confident, editorial layout. This poster was designed in both Arabic and English languages.

The identity in the world

The finished identity presented on different mockups.