Multi
Disciplinary
Designer
I design things you hold and things you scroll.
Shoes, bags, websites, identities
— and one building.
(About)
Products, brands, garments, and the sites that carry them — disciplines most keep separate, which is why the work holds together. I work with founders who know what good looks like and want it executed without being walked through it. Some start at zero. Others outgrew what once worked. Rigorous process. Enjoyable too — which shouldn't be rare.
II
Digital Design
ALEXANDRIA
Statement
Reduction is the practice. The shoe only agrees.
Built by reduction: no seams, no hardware, nothing to fasten. What is left is one continuous upper and two layers that overlap and wrap the foot, closer to a rope than to a construction. It is named for Alexandria, where my parents took me every summer as a child, a week by the sea away from everything. The city still means the same thing to me: time off and rest.
Material
3D printed in one piece, Zellerfeld
Upper
One continuous upper, two overlapping layers
Status
Concept, renders
Year
2026
Process
Printed, not moulded.
A mould set has to exist before a single pair does. Printing removes that, so a first pair can be tested rather than bet on, and it gives cushioning that is hard to reach any other way in one piece. It is made for a walk: the park, the dog, the way to pilates. It also holds up under formal wear, which most shoes built for those three do not.
← BACK TO WORKInspiration
Continuity, borrowed from stillness.
The references were mostly not footwear. They were conditions — a room with nothing left in it, a line that never breaks, the point in a session where the noise drops away and only the movement remains. Translating that meant refusing the things a shoe usually announces itself with: no panels, no stitch lines, no hardware, no logo doing the talking. The two overlapping layers at the upper arrived last and stayed, because wrapping reads as shelter in a way fastening never does. The foot is held rather than secured.
NOUGAT
Statement
Three bags, one stepped outline.
Each bag took its shape from its job. The tote carries a working day, the east-west an evening’s essentials laid flat, the clutch almost nothing at all. The steps hold them together: a raised panel on the tote, the profile of the opening on the east-west, the outline itself on the clutch. They are not applied to the leather. They are cut into it.
Pieces
Tote, east-west, clutch
Material
Textured leather, suede lining
Closure
Covered magnets, no zips
Colourways
Grey, purple, forest green, baby blue, black
Process
The zip came out.
The east-west was drawn with a zip. On the samples the black tape read cheap against the leather, and read differently against each colour. So the zip came out and the structure took over: a wooden frame and a covered magnet. The bag now opens flat, like a long drawer, with phone, perfume, keys and wallet laid out side by side rather than piled.
← BACK TO WORKInspiration
A container built to hold containers.
Beneath Djoser’s step pyramid, excavators found more than forty thousand stone vessels. The tomb was a container built to hold containers, and a bag holds what you have decided is worth carrying. Djoser rather than any other because of the steps: six of them, each smaller than the one below, the only pyramid profile you can read as a sequence instead of a single mass. A sequence is something a pattern can be built from.
RECECE
Statement
Ironwork, taken off the wall.
The pattern comes from a wrought-iron window grille — the kind where the curves close into flowers. Cast in resin, it keeps the ironwork's weight and its shadows. Suede sits behind the openings, so the colour you see is the lining, not the shell.
Discipline
Accessories
Year
2026
Material
Cast resin over suede
Colourways
White and green, white and blue, black and tan
Philosophy
Same grille, three linings.
The shell stays the same and the suede behind it changes everything. White over green reads like a garden wall, white over blue like lace, and black over tan like the ironwork it came from.
← BACK TO WORKInspiration
Where this one started.
NAJWA
Statement
The decoration and the construction are a single cut.
A lotus column is not a column with a pattern on it. It is a bundle of stems cut in stone, gathered and tied at the head. Najwa is built the same way: one panel, slit into stems. Nothing is applied and nothing is added. The stems are closed at head and foot and free along their length, so the body opens as it fills and draws back as it empties. Najwa is Arabic for a whisper, a confidential talk held apart from everyone else.
Material
3 mm leather, suede lining
Construction
One panel per side, hand sewn
Colourways
Black, natural, tan
Year
2026
Process
Two sides, one outline.
The second side is cut out of the waste of the first: positive and negative taken from the same piece of hide. What is not cut away is not thrown away. The first body was cut flat and closed with paperclips, enough to see whether the stems would carry a load and fall back into line once the weight came out. It was carried before it had a handle, to find where the weight wanted to sit and how far the stems would open before the shape stopped reading.
ZALAT
Statement
Gravel, carried underfoot.
In parts of Asia people walk barefoot over laid stone on purpose, on paths built to press the foot rather than spare it. Zalat is Egyptian Arabic for gravel, loose river stone. Paving is flat, sorted and locked together; gravel is none of those things, and the foot has to read it. So the elements are few and large rather than many and small, each one domed, set at its own angle, standing proud. A flat top would remove the reason for the thing.
Material
Translucent blue resin
Structure
Domed elements on a hidden wire
Status
In development, first model
Year
2026
Process
A first model, not a finished one.
Each element is one part, rounded above and below, with the wire run through its middle rather than across the bottom. The stones touch only near the top edge, where the wire crosses, so the footbed hinges high and no wire shows in any gap. The resin lets light in and returns it lighter: almost white where it catches, deep blue where it does not. Modelled to test the arrangement, not the finish. The profile still has to come down and the spacing is not final.
HATEM.IS
Statement
A portfolio built on its subject's own thesis: find the structure before you solve anything.
A physicist working on multicomputation, observer theory and metamathematics needed a portfolio. The default for that brief is a CV — a list, chronological, institution first. It answers where he has been, which is the least interesting question about him. His own argument is that every domain has a hidden grammar, and that recognising it comes before solving anything. So the site was built to obey that claim rather than describe it.
VISIT HATEM.IS ↗Client
Hatem Elshatlawy
Role
Concept, art direction, design, build
Scope
Research portfolio — home and CV
Year
2026
Live
Philosophy
Systems repeat. Scales change. Grammar persists.
One gesture repeats at three scales. The roman numeral indexes the seven principles, counts the disciplines in the carousel, and runs as the spine of the page. Same mark, three sizes — the claim itself, made in a form you can see rather than read. Restraint did the rest: black, white, one blue, and a single orange used exactly once, on the only button that asks for something. Nothing decorative survived that wasn't structural. The CV page is where it holds hardest. That is the one page where a chronology is expected, and the one page that isn't one. The route so far — a line you travel, years dropped behind the institutions as ghosted numerals rather than ranked in front of them.
Inspiration
Things that keep their shape at every zoom.
The references weren't other portfolios. They were the objects his own field studies — the Mandelbrot set, protein folding, structures that hold their grammar however far you zoom in. Self-similarity was the brief and the method at the same time: build something whose smallest part carries the same rule as the whole.
LOXORD
Statement
A shop that catalogues rather than sells.
Every object carries an archive code, an edition size and the coordinates of the city it was made in. LXR-C0-02-2026. Edition of 150. Cairo, 30.0444 degrees north. That is the vocabulary of a collection rather than a storefront, and it settles everything downstream: no countdowns, no scarcity banners, no you-might-also-like. None of those belong to an object that has been catalogued. The nav says OBJECTS, not products. The grid is called a SET, not a collection.
VISIT LOXORD ↗Client
Loxord
Role
Concept, art direction, design, build
Scope
Storefront, product, policies, contact
Platform
Shopify
Live
Philosophy
Repair is a ritual of the house. Objects return.
That line sits on the contact page and it is the whole position. A store built to move volume treats a return as failure. This one treats it as the relationship continuing, and asks for a photograph and the object's archive code the way a workshop would. The voice holds the same register everywhere. The house answers, calmly and in order of arrival. It holds its form the way memory holds a place, loosely and completely. Language doing structural work, not decoration.
Inspiration
The pyramid is not printed on it. It is its outline.
The stepped profile of the tote is a ziggurat seen side on — the same Saqqara reference that runs through the physical work, but structural rather than applied. Bag and store were drawn from one set of references, and the store carries it through: each page sits in its own colour field rather than a shared white, so moving between object, product and contact feels like moving through rooms instead of tabs.
CAIRO929
Statement
Three languages, one of which runs the other way.
Cairo929 sells outbound sales into DACH, the UK and the Gulf — which meant the site had to hold in English, German and Arabic. That is three different problems wearing one layout. German compounds run long and break grids measured in English: Aftersales Account Manager für Deutschland und Schweiz has to sit in the same card as a four word English title. Arabic runs right to left, which is not a translation job but a structural one — reading order, navigation, the direction arrows point, where a number sits relative to its label. A layout that only survives in one language is not a layout. It is a picture of one.
VISIT CAIRO929 ↗Client
Cairo929
Role
Brand, concept, design, build, copy
Scope
Trilingual site — EN / DE / AR
Platform
Webflow
Live
Philosophy
Proof first. Promise second.
Every agency in this category opens with the same sentence about predictable pipeline, so the claim itself is worthless as a differentiator. The site leads with evidence instead: two million in expansion revenue, three months to a first signed customer, four Gulf markets entered after two previous attempts had failed. Numbers before adjectives. The structure follows that order deliberately — case studies sit above services in the navigation, because what was done is more persuasive than what is offered.
Inspiration
Reading is a direction before it is a language.
Arabic typesetting was the reference, not other agency sites. Once a layout has to mirror, every asymmetry becomes a decision you have to defend: which side the logo sits, which way progress runs, whether an arrow means forward or back. Building the English version so the Arabic could exist made the English version better — the same discipline that makes a grid work at two breakpoints instead of one.
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