Syed Athar Ali Shah arrived in Jeddah on March 11, 1975

It’s not just a logo but several memories are attached to this symbol: Shah

Syed Athar Ali Shah recalls the early days of the newspaper, including his part in shaping its identity.

When I met Shah on the terrace of the historic Karachi Press Club, I did not realize that one of the two designers of the Arab News logo, which was created in the mid-1970s, was standing before me.

We had talked on the phone a few days before about those early days and I was expecting a quite elderly man. In person, a youthful 70-year-old greeted me. “Eating healthy food, having great publishers and the excellent, pleasant and enabling environment at the newsroom of Arab News, where I spent nearly four decades and a happy life in Jeddah, is the secret,” Shah told me.

I had planned to meet him at his residence in Gulshan-e-Maymar, a posh neighborhood on Karachi’s outskirts, but Shah said that he would meet me at the press club before going to the nearby Arts Council where one of his friends from Jeddah was scheduled to speak.

Shah is one of the two creators of the Arab News logo. “My colleague, Nazar, and I jointly created three different logos and the late Syed Mohammed Ali chose one, which we have seen on the newspaper front for decades now,” he said.

“I went to Jeddah on March 11, 1975 after I worked for nearly a decade in a Karachi-based advertising agency as a commercial artist. I, along with Nazar, was ... as a designer for Arab News and was with the paper from its first day,” Shah recalls. “I used to make a page of cartoons daily for the tabloid, which subsequently became a broadsheet,” he said.

Shah is philosophical about this year’s changes to the original logo that he helped to design.

A logo was an enduring part of the identity of a paper and lasted for years, decades and centuries, he said. “It remains the same. It’s not just a logo but several memories are attached to this symbol.”

“But, yes, we can modernize it. With newspapers entering the digital age, the logo should be modernized,” he said. For years, many believed that the logo had been created by the late cartoonist Mahmoud Kahil, Shah said. “It was not created by me (alone); it was created by both of us, Nazar and me. Our first priority was uniqueness, so instead of using the contemporary fonts we decided to create our own.”

“My most pleasant and great professional journey with Arab News ended in 2009, after which I started working with another newspaper for two years but came back to Pakistan last year. “It is now more than four months since I began living in Karachi but my heart still roams over there in Jeddah.”