Are you feeling as helpless watching our ongoing environmental crisis as the next person? Are you used to taking a car, or flying, and considering your impact on the environment completely paralyzes you?

My wife and I are currently trapped in a situation between Amman and Germany where she has a job in Amman but we have to show up in Germany twice a year to not violate restrictive German residency laws.
That means an awful lot of flying for the coming two years.
(Being well aware that that’s nothing in comparison to many people’s traveling habits, especially business people. But I’m trying to mind my own business here)

Then, for the summers in Germany, we take the car around the country or even the continent.

But there is in fact something you can do: Compensate your personal carbon emissions by paying certain organizations to fund environment protection projects such as planting trees that turn the carbon back into oxygen or funding renewable energy projects.

Did you get as fed up with Facebook in 2016 as I did?
The way Facebook’s and Google’s algorithms help shape public opinion is a violent cancer in today’s society. Brexit and the Trump election are only the beginning, as Artifical Intelligence will only become more precise very quickly in targeting people.
Also, on a side note, the amount of ads in my Facebook stream have become an unacceptable abscess during the last year.

Please take the time to read this article on the recent US elections and social media to understand why I believe that Google and Facebook are inherently evil and need to be avoided.

On the other hand, I enjoy public discussions of news-worthy events and connections with far-away people as much as anyone else.
Facebook is far from alternative-less. The most promising alternative for me is Diaspora, and every now and then I try to convince my friends to make the switch, knowing that it’s the critical mass of people on Facebook that makes everyone stick with it.

Diaspora is an open-source, community-developed and -run social network. Its web site behaves not much unlike Facebook. It is comparatively unpolished and is missing loads of features (like events and groups), but the primary functionality of staying in touch with people and posting content and commenting on them have been there since forever. Diaspora’s progress is slow, but the advantages far outweigh the drawbacks.

I’ve been waiting for this day for a very long time now, and I’m extra happy, excited, and proud to present you with the results of what I would call my dream type design project: The Arabic counterpart to the popular FF DIN designed by Albert-Jan Pool.
FF DIN can easily be called one of the world’s most popular contemporary typefaces. It is a remake of the DIN 1451 that we as Germans see on our road signs and public signage day in, day out.

Some time towards the end of 2013 I got approached by FontShop International in Berlin whether I would be up for designing FF DIN Arabic. I couldn’t quite believe what was happening.
After having designed FF Amman in 2008/09 I had secretly wished that I could design FF DIN Arabic, but I had never told anyone. That was before having received my type design education at Type & Media in Den Haag in 2010/11, and had anyone asked me at the time, I would have most likely turned the offer down because I wouldn’t have felt experienced enough to do it. Then in 2013, after having undergone all the super fruitful education in Den Haag, I was ready and bursting with energy and excitement. This is exactly the kind of project you’re looking for after Type & Media.
So I returned to Amman for half a year in winter 2014/15 to design it.

Welcome back, my dear web site.

I’m happy and proud to introduce the new version of my website.
It was sorely needed.

My old web site went online in 2009. That’s two years after the introduction of the original iPhone, but mobile browsing hadn’t come to my attention at the time. Not only was it unusable on mobile phones, but when I created it, I failed to implement a proper easy-to-use backend (the editing part that the visitor never gets to see). Instead, its structure was file-based based, with the backend interface being my FTP app. While that saved me time developing, it turned out way too complicated to use on a regular basis. Subsequently, I haven’t really updated my web site in the last few years.