James Stuart is railing against boring design with techniques inspired by the spirit of Arabic hardcore music

When graphic designer James Stuart isn’t kicking out the jams in Arabic-language punk band Haram, he’s managing a “somewhat incongruous balance between designing artwork for musicians” and making documentary films. When a life in making non-fiction films called to him ten years ago, he still kept one foot in his design career. “Now I just do both. Well, I do three things. I am a musician first. Much of the work on my site is artwork created for the records I’ve made,” says James, the design polymath behind these striking pieces of album art, record sleeves and posters, filled with punk spirit.

Rooted in the strong visual heritage of the Arabic language, his work references everything from emerging indie rock cultures such as Taqwacore (a portmanteau of ‘hardcore’ and the Arabic word ‘taqwa’ تقوى, which is usually translated as ‘piety’ or the quality of being ‘God-fearing’), zoomorphic calligraphy and illustrations of animals that merge the penmanship of writing with the craft of drawing.

“Typically, the visual accompaniment to a given piece of music benefits from a rigorous rule-set, or notion of the guidelines within which a visual response must reside. Because my work utilises typography, photography, model making, filmmaking and illustration, I really struggle to forge a coherent response without any creative or conceptual limitations,” says James. “With all of that being said, sometimes I choose to throw all of that out the window and just turn out something that feels right in the moment. The gene behind a lot of my artwork really relates to making rules and then breaking them.”

Whatever the practice, James instills a branding mentality to his work by creating strong, consistently applied identities with “set creative boundaries” within bold colours, impactful type treatments and highly manipulated photography or computer generated elements. James learned during his time in non-fiction filmmaking that he was interested in history, current affairs and geopolitics, which resulted in James bringing his visual acuity from design into filmmaking (and vice versa). When it comes to telling engaging stories in his work, James has got it nailed down, making incredible use of calligraphy and the directionality of Arabic script to bulk out his works in swirling, mesmerising line-work and thus infusing it with political weight. Some may not be able to read it, but you can tell what it’s saying. Just like hardcore music, it’s all in the feeling.