Samarkand
Preserving Palestinian embroidery through contemporary design systemClient / Samarkand
Industry / Cultural Preservation
Type / Cultural Initiative
Location / West Bank, Palestine
Year / 2025
Samarkand is a cultural initiative dedicated to preserving traditional Palestinian tatreez (cross-stitch embroidery). They offered embroidered products, hands-on tatreez workshops, and research to protect this art form while fostering global appreciation.
Trained in International Law and Human Rights at Bard College, Samar Abedrabo founded Samarkand to teach Palestinian tatreez to a new generation—creating embroidery kits and leading workshops that empower beginners to connect with this heritage under occupation.
Samar needed an accessible identity for tatreez embroidery kits that could appeal to a wider audience, including international audiences. The initial brief requested no visual references to tatreez patterns—the concern being that literal reproduction might appear dated or limit contemporary appeal.
The brief presented inherent tensions: honouring Palestinian tradition while remaining approachable globally, being distinctly Palestinian without appearing dated, working across product sales and cultural preservation, and addressing current needs while building a scalable system designed for growth. The deeper question: how does design serve cultural preservation work under occupation, where traditional practices become resistance simply by continuing to exist?
Samarkand is operating from Bethlehem, West Bank, under the suffocating Israeli occupation. This reality added complexity. Cultural preservation work here carries political weight; therefore, continuing traditional practices asserts Palestinian identity, heritage, and connection to the land.
Practically, limited resources due to the ongoing occupation meant straightforward printing, standard materials, and local production, which the solution needs to account for. The bilingual nature of the work carried political weight, too. Under occupation, erasure is systematic—Arabic place names of Palestinian villages and cities are removed, replaced, or disappeared from maps and signage altogether.
In this context, ensuring that Arabic doesn't take second place simply because the work needs to appeal to international audiences becomes an act of resistance. Arabic and Latin scripts have fundamentally different structures and reading directions, requiring careful consideration to create true bilingual equivalence rather than hierarchy.
Observing Samarkand's tatreez workshops revealed patterns beyond visible embroidery. Participants gathered in rough circles, each with their own work, occasionally helping neighbours. The physical arrangement fosters community connection while preserving individual focus. Experienced stitchers developed rhythm—needle up, needle down, counting the threads. The repetition was meditative, building slowly toward something larger and more intricate.
Every complex tatreez pattern builds from the basic cross-stitch. Knowledge is transferred through practice, passed down from generation to generation. The patterns carried meaning, and the gathering created space for stories to be preserved. This revealed tatreez as methodology: individual elements combining through intention, precision, and community to create something infinite and meaningful.
in Qalandia Camp Women's Handicraft Society, Palestine 1974.
Ekrem Canli / Wikipedia / CC BY-SA 3.0
Andrew Shiva / Wikipedia / CC BY-SA 4.0
The solution begins with four circles arranged to echo the gathering of women around their embroidery. Their intersection creates a distinctive star-shaped form in the negative space between them—a geometric distillation of tatreez's fundamental building block, the single cross-stitch.
Just as every tatreez pattern begins with one stitch that multiplies into thousands, this mark tessellates into infinite patterns. The construction mirrors the practice: individual elements combining through intention and precision to create something larger than themselves, echoing how both tatreez and Islamic geometric art build complexity from humble repetition.
The identity becomes dynamic, allowing it to adapt to Samarkand's growing initiatives and needs.
The primary bilingual logo embodies the essence of the Samarkand story: community creating sanctuary. Two flanking marks create natural brackets around the bilingual wordmark, their inner curves forming a protective embrace that mirrors the circle of women gathered around their tatreez. Just as Palestinian women create safe space for stories, memories, and dreams through their communal practice, the marks create visual sanctuary for the Samarkand name—honouring both languages, both cultures, within the same protective geometry.
The symmetrical arrangement reflects Samarkand's balanced mission: deeply rooted in Palestinian tradition yet designed to welcome international audiences. The marks stand as guardians of cultural meaning while the typography bridges worlds, ensuring both Arabic and Latin scripts receive equal visual dignity rather than hierarchical positioning that privileges one language over another.
The typographic approach prioritises clarity and accessibility across cultures, intentionally creating space around the geometric mark rather than competing with it. Grantha Sangam MN for Latin script and Anaqa Variable for Arabic provide clean and legible geometric sans-serifs. Rather than using heritage-inspired or overtly cultural typefaces that risk appearing dated or exotic, the typography takes a supporting role.
The primary palette restricts to black and white for practical, cultural, and strategic reasons. Single-colour printing is most cost-effective for small-scale production, and reducing variables prevents colour inconsistency across applications.
Culturally, this mirrors how traditional tatreez uses open-weave fabric, black or white, as structural foundation with coloured threads providing pattern—the identity provides structure, the embroidery provides colour. Strategically, restraint creates distinctive consistency and allows photography and tatreez imagery to command attention without graphic design competition.
The system provides multiple configurations serving different functional needs: bilingual primary for most applications, Latin-only or Arabic-only for specific contexts, tessellated versions for larger applications, and mark-only options when the name isn't needed. Rather than forcing a single logo configuration across all contexts, the system acknowledges that different applications have different needs while maintaining family resemblance.
The tessellated marks function as both a decorative pattern and a practical organisational structure, mirroring how tatreez's counted grid enables both artistic expression and precise execution. The tessellation creates a modular grid that can organise content blocks, align elements, and establish hierarchies. In some contexts, the grid appears explicitly; in others, it functions invisibly as an organisational principle. The system stays flexible on the surface while keeping consistent logic at its core.
The grid itself echoes another foundational element of tatreez—the blank open-weave fabric. Just as that fabric provides structure where artisans thread their creativity and stories, Samarkand's identity becomes infrastructure where learners can create their own narratives within the framework of tradition.