Government & Civic

FEDERAL AFFAIRS OFFICE

Bilingual civic identity across a full building elevation, engineered to read with equal authority in daylight and after dark.

Client: Government of Sharjah
Location: Sharjah, UAE
Disciplines: Building Signage, Wayfinding, Illuminated Signage

Federal Affairs Office — Government & Civic signage installation in Sharjah, UAE

Project overview

A government office building requires signage that does one thing above all: identify itself unambiguously, in both national languages, to a public that has to find it from the road.

Scope of work

Bilingual facade identification
Crest and lettering fabrication
Illumination design
Facade installation

The challenge

What made it difficult

Civic signage carries a formality that commercial work does not. The crest has to be reproduced faithfully at scale, Arabic and English have to sit as equals rather than one being the translation of the other, and the whole composition has to hold against a facade of strong vertical fins that fragment anything laid across them.

The concept

How we approached it

Set the identity as a single horizontal band above the fin field, where it reads as an uninterrupted line. Arabic and English are set at matched optical weight and given equal field width, with the crest centred as the fulcrum between them.

The solution

FROM DRAWING
TO HANDOVER.

01
Design
Type sized against the setback distance from the approach road, with Arabic and English balanced optically rather than by point size — the two scripts do not share a cap height.
02
Fabrication
Fabricated letters and crest produced with internal illumination, faces and returns detailed for exterior exposure.
03
Installation
Setting out referenced to the facade band above the fin line so the identity spans clean, with fixing detail suited to the cladding substrate.
04
Night state
Illumination levelled so the crest and both scripts reach the same apparent brightness — the most common failure mode in bilingual illuminated signage is one script reading brighter than the other.