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Beirut Editions

posted by Emily Gosling November 24, 2020

This year’s not been short of news, but one of the saddest and most brutally shocking things to hit the headlines over the summer was the massive explosion that hit Beirut on 4 August.

The disaster in the Lebanese capital is said to have caused at least 204 deaths, 6,500 injuries and left an estimated 300,000 people homeless. In a bid to help the relief effort, the ever-excellent Tala Safié—a New York-based Lebanese designer and art director—has assembled a formidable team of creative industry veterans to create the Beirut Editions print-based fundraiser. Full disclosure, I’ve previously worked with Safié at Eye on Design where she helmed the superb design of the publication’s pilot print mag issue and created one of my personal fav EoD projects, the spoof gossip mag Spotted—but that doesn’t diminish the fact she’s superb at what she does, with other projects behind her including the design of a New York Times special print section in August this year celebrating 100 years of women’s right to vote in the US.

For Beirut Editions, she teamed up with filmmaker and former Beirut resident, Noel Paul; worker-owned design studio Partner & Partners and writer and publisher, Perrin Drumm (again, disclosure-wise, my former boss at EoD). This fundraising project has seen the team gather together a number of limited-edition prints and originals from a beautifully diverse range of illustrators, artists, designers and printers, with 100% of sales funding emergency relief efforts to help communities in the aftermath of the explosion.

Among the creatives who’ve contributed to the project are

Amber Vittoria, Sarah Mazzetti, Derek Abella, Mohamad Abdouni, Michèle Aoun, Myriam Boulos, Erik Brandt, Erik Carter, Matt Willey, Studio Safar, Sally Thurer, Ping Zhu, Nichole Shinn, Thomas Colligan, Rose Wong, Cari Van Der Yacht, Astrid Terrazas, Julia Rothman, Mazen Kerbaj, Elana Schlenker, Najeebah Al-Ghadban, Tracy Ma, Mona Chalabi, Elaine Lopez, Julian Glander and a tonne more.

Prints are available to buy until 30 November 2020; and the sale is hosted by Booklyn, an artist-run NGO specialising in publishing, distributing, and exhibiting print-based works that address urgent socially-driven topics.