Design Ideas Logo
Qatar 2022: A study in Arabesque and football

Qatar 2022: A study in Arabesque and football

Charis Tsevis
February 9, 2022
1 Comment

Every four years, the world gathers to enjoy and worship the most popular team sport worldwide, football or soccer. The FIFA World Cup is a grand championship featuring the best athletes, coaches, sports directors, managers, and many other professions. But it's also an excellent opportunity for creative professionals. We designers, artists, technicians have a chance to be inspired by a country, a nation, a culture. We can approach aesthetics from a different - distant or close - part of the world. We can find the differences and the similarities with our own culture, and we can create art inspired by all this incredible journey.
I have been creating artworks inspired by the World Cups and other major sports events for more than 15 years. Sometimes commissioned by organizations, teams, or corporations and sometimes as self-initiated projects like this one.



Studying the cultural heritage of different parts of the world appreciating the traditions, customs, and creativity of other nations, tribes, groups of people, mainstream and underground, is an incredible journey I could imagine.
I enjoyed studying Arabic cultural treasures in the previous years—especially the Arabesque and Islamic patterns. For someone who has been dealing with patterns all my life, I can say the Arabesque is probably the most advanced and most challenging pattern exercise one artist can do. Advanced mathematics and geometry are needed and a lot of dedication and discipline.
Here are the results of some of my studies in pattern design, Illustrations, portraits of footballers, logos and typographic compositions, animations.
Special thanks to my wife and coworker Vera, who has designed most of the bannai and other types of geometric Arabic typographic compositions and animated versions. ​​​​​​​


I am creating digital and analog mosaics for more than 20 years. In all this period I have used tens of software packages and I have studied many of the centuries old traditional techniques. I have developed my own scripts, hacks and techniques using a combination of tools. Mostly Studio Artist by Synthetik and the Adobe Creative Cloud suite of applications.





I am happy to see the positive reaction to this project from people around the world. I am particularly happy for the positive feedback from people from the Arab world. I am studying their culture for some years, but they are living it. So it's very encouraging that they have accepted and approved my approach.

I love making these virtual travels around the world studying the culture and the visual language of different nations. It's a very educational and really joyful experience.

Charis Tsevis

Visual designer living on the sunny side of the planet.

One comment on “Qatar 2022: A study in Arabesque and football”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *