it's THE ALIEN — Ahmed Al Badry

The Challenge

Arafa Group — Egypt's oldest fashion & textile house — faced a critical moment in 2023. During a nationwide boycott wave against Western brands, they needed a campaign to protect market share while positioning their local brand as the obvious Egyptian choice.

The real problem: Consumers wanted Egyptian alternatives, but didn't yet think of fashion as a place to express that. Foreign brands still owned the perception of "style."

The Insight

"The boycott isn't about what you stop buying — it's about what you start being proud of."

We stopped defending the brand and started celebrating 100 million Egyptians as the real icons.

Arafa didn't need visibility. It needed to own the new narrative before competitors did. It needed to redefine what "style" looks like — locally.

The Strategy

Typography

Bold Arabic sans at monumental scale. Arabic leads, English follows. The type is not supporting the visual — it is the visual.

Casting

Real Egyptians from baby to grandparent, not models. Diversity was the message.

Color Palette

A fully saturated red environment dominates the frame. Not as decoration — but as a unifying cultural field.

Photography

Controlled studio lighting. Clean, shadow-managed setup. Every subject intentionally separated from the background.

The Concept

"100 MILLION STYLE" — every Egyptian is a style icon. Not the model. Not the campaign. You.

Visual Execution

Execution & Impact

Campaign deployed across TV spots, OOH in 10 premium Cairo locations (Ring Road, 6th October, New Cairo), radio on 4 leading national stations, and a social competition inviting Egyptians to post their own "100 Million Style" looks.

+20M impressions

+9M video views

Ads of the World featured

The Learning: In a cultural moment, don't sell — celebrate. The campaigns that tried to defend "buy local" felt political. The one that celebrated people felt human. That's what made it spread.

Role & Collaboration

Art Director, 360° Campaign Lead — directed photography, typography system, OOH production, TV/radio adaptation, and social content. Led a multidisciplinary crew across photography, casting, wardrobe, and post-production.

The Challenge

InstaPay had already scaled to 12M+ users and 1.5B+ transactions. The challenge wasn't growth — it was behavior. How do you make the next wave of mass users stop defaulting to cash?

The core problem: Cash isn't just a payment method in Egypt — it's a habit. For most people, digital payments still felt distant. Not built for them. Making InstaPay feel premium would alienate the mass. Making it feel cheap would break trust.

The Insight

"The obstacle isn't understanding InstaPay — it's feeling like it belongs to them."

We had to make 12 million users look like the first 100 million. People don't adopt tools. They adopt what feels familiar.

The Strategy

Casting

Real people across different ages and lifestyles. Not "actors" — people you recognize instantly.

Typography

Bold, high-contrast Arabic headlines. Large, disruptive, impossible to ignore. Readable in a second — even in motion.

Color & Tone

InstaPay purple combined with warm Egyptian skin tones and ambient lighting. No corporate fintech blues.

Composition

The phone is always in-hand — never isolated. The product lives inside the moment, not outside it.

The Concept

"w INGEZ" — "and get it done." A phrase from everyday Egyptian life, not a banking slogan. Short. Direct. Already owned by the people.

Every headline ends with "w INGEZ" — the phrase becomes the rhythm and the brand.

Visual Execution

Execution & Impact

Multi-market rollout across TV, Digital OOH, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok. All assets adapted across EN/AR with RTL typography and Arabic-first hierarchy. Print-ready and social-native versions produced in parallel.

12.5M+ users

Multi-market rollout

AI-driven workflow

The Learning: "The challenge wasn't design — it was restraint. We didn't need it to look 'premium'. We needed it to feel real. AI didn't replace the craft — it gave us control over it."

Role & Collaboration

Art Director, Campaign Creative — led the visual system, casting direction, and AI-driven photography approach. Worked within a multidisciplinary team across strategy, copy, and compliance, balancing creative ambition with fintech regulations.

The Challenge

Pretzo — an Egyptian snack brand entering a competitive FMCG category — needed a premium product photography library at a fraction of traditional studio cost. Launch was 3 weeks away.

The core constraint: Traditional food photography is expensive and slow. A full product suite requires $15–25K, weeks of production, and full studio crews. Pretzo had neither the budget nor the time. Stock imagery felt generic and killed the brand's premium perception.

The Insight

"AI isn't replacing photography — it's replacing the parts of photography that were always the bottleneck: location, lighting setup, and retakes."

Traditional workflows waste time on environmental setup. Taste in directing — art direction, composition, brand consistency — that's what's irreplaceable. AI could handle one. We'd handle the other.

The Workflow

01 Define

Scene concepts based on product use moments

02 Generate

Multiple AI base scenes per concept

03 Direct

Select, refine, enforce brand consistency

04 Compose

Integrate real product into AI scenes

Step 5: Polish — color grading, lighting match, final output.

The System

The product is always real — never generated

AI is used for environments, props, and context

Every scene is art-directed — not auto-generated

Consistency is controlled across all outputs

A hybrid workflow that keeps the product real and makes everything else synthetic — so AI serves craft, not the other way around.

Visual Execution

Impact & Results

Full photography suite deployed at multiple product scenarios — from hero shots to fully constructed lifestyle scenes. Each visual was built through a controlled pipeline: real product integration, AI-generated environments, final compositing.

~15% traditional cost

4 days vs. 2 weeks

Studio-grade quality

The Learning: "The real innovation wasn't the AI — it was how you direct it. The tools are accessible. Taste isn't."

Role & Collaboration

Designed and led the AI-driven production system from concept and scene design to final compositing. Built a repeatable workflow that delivers premium FMCG visuals at speed and scale. Worked closely across generation, compositing, and retouch to maintain full creative control.

The Challenge

Every snack brand is loud. Bold colours and oversized logos are expected — not distinctive. The category competes on price and distribution, not meaning.

Jaguar needed something competitors couldn't discount: a personality.

The Insight

"You can't out-shout this category. You can out-feel it."

Brands that own a reaction — not a colour — are the ones people remember.

The Strategy

Visual Vocabulary

Real photography + collage manipulation + floating snack elements. Never static. Never clean.

Typography

Bold, unstable display. The type always reacts — never sits still.

Color System

Aggressive gradients per flavour. Loud, but controlled chaos.

Scene Logic

Unexpected interactions building tension toward a punchline.

The Concept

Build the brand around one iconic reaction: "What is this?!"

A raw, involuntary moment of surprise. Every asset builds toward it. Every asset lands on it.

Visual Execution

Impact & Results

Built a distinctive identity in a visually saturated category. Transformed Jaguar from product-led to personality-led. Created a scalable content system for always-on production.

Personality-driven brand

Scalable content system

Scroll-stopping within 0.5s

The Learning: Building a brand around emotion is harder than building one around aesthetics. But it's the only thing competitors can't copy.

Role & Collaboration

Art Director — led brand identity, built the social creative system, and defined a scalable content language. Led cross-functional teams across photography, illustration, and 3D.

The Challenge

New soda brands fail fast. Shelf presence is everything. If the system isn't flexible, every new flavour looks like a different brand. If it's too flexible, nothing feels distinct.

SparX needed to launch into a category dominated by global players.

The Insight

"A soda brand isn't a label — it's a system."

Get the structure right, and every new flavour becomes an extension — not a redesign.

The Strategy

Logo System

The "X" as a flexible brand anchor built from fizz physics

Color System

Distinct palettes per flavour within a controlled structure

Typography

Clean, modern, highly legible across all sizes

Visual Language

Layered gradients and organic shapes reflecting fizz

The Concept

A bold, bubbly "X" built from fizz physics.

Each variant expresses its own identity through color and ingredients, while the structure remains constant.

Visual Execution

Impact & Results

Built a full identity system capable of scaling across multiple flavours and future extensions. Strong shelf impact with flexibility that didn't compromise brand unity.

Scalable system

Shelf presence

Flexible architecture

Role & Collaboration

Visual Direction, System Design & Design Oversight — led the identity development, packaging architecture, and flavour extension system.

The Challenge

Used oil disposal is invisible. It feels boring. And not urgent. Green Pan needed to stop households and restaurants from pouring used cooking oil down the drain and drive behavior change through doorstep pickup.

Most campaigns talk at people — and get ignored. The audience needed a story they couldn't look away from.

The Insight

"People don't act because they're told to. They act when they see themselves in the story."

Build a story where the viewer moves from witness → accused → hero.

The Strategy

A three-act narrative built on visual escalation:

ACT 1 — CRIME: Miniature forensic scenes, macro lens realism, evidence markers, high contrast lighting

ACT 2 — CULPRIT: Illustrated character bridging education and storytelling

ACT 3 — HERO: Cinematic product framing, warm light, aspirational tone

Visual Execution

Impact & Results

Rolled out across social and digital with sequencing logic: audiences saw CRIME first, CULPRIT second, HERO third. Carrefour retail tie-ins drove drop-off points.

Three-act narrative

Miniature scene construction

Behavioral change campaign

The Learning: "People don't act when they're instructed. They act when they see themselves in the story. Turn them into the hero — and they respond."

Role & Collaboration

Art Director & Campaign Strategist — developed the narrative framework, directed visual storytelling across three distinct acts, and led rollout across social and digital. Led multi-track production combining photography, illustration, and miniature scene construction.

I Design Bold Brand Identities.

Ahmed Al Badry
The Alien.

I don't chase trends.
I study the masters.

Be unique.
Be Alien.

I Design Bold Brand Identities.

Ahmed Al BadryThe Alien.

I don't chase trends.I study the masters.

Be unique.Be Alien.

The Challenge

The Insight

The Strategy

Typography

Casting

Color Palette

Photography

The Concept

Visual Execution

Execution & Impact

Role & Collaboration

The Challenge

The Insight

The Strategy

Casting

Typography

Color & Tone

Composition

The Concept

Visual Execution

Execution & Impact

Role & Collaboration

The Challenge

The Insight

The Workflow

01 Define

02 Generate

03 Direct

04 Compose

The System

Visual Execution

Impact & Results

Role & Collaboration

The Challenge

The Insight

The Strategy

Visual Vocabulary

Typography

Color System

Scene Logic

The Concept

Visual Execution

Impact & Results

Role & Collaboration

The Challenge

The Insight

The Strategy

Logo System

Color System

Typography

Visual Language

The Concept

Visual Execution

Impact & Results

Role & Collaboration

The Challenge

The Insight

The Strategy

Visual Execution

Impact & Results

Role & Collaboration

Ahmed Al Badry
The Alien.

I don't chase trends.
I study the masters.

Be unique.
Be Alien.