Episode: 135 — "We Are All Libyans But Not the Same — Ahmed Al-Baroudi" · Full Episode #135
Language: Libyan Arabic
Ahmed Al-Baroudi (أحمد البارودي) is a Libyan telecommunications engineer turned visual identity practitioner. He is a co-founder of Dawaya (داوية), a Libyan calligraphy and visual culture collective that has run a recurring exhibition programme for seven years. He was commissioned by the Libyan state to produce the country's first formal Libyan Visual Identity Guide, a document setting out a national design system for state communications.
Ahmed trained as a telecommunications engineer and worked inside that profession before migrating sideways into design and visual identity. The migration was gradual and self-directed. He treated design as a discipline he had to learn from the ground up, the same way he had learned signal engineering — through repeated attempts, structured feedback, and a slow accumulation of working hours. He did not pretend the transition was easy. He was explicit that one of the most disabling forces inside the Libyan creative sector is the fear of being mocked for taking a public risk on craft you have not yet mastered.
His sharpest line, delivered as a diagnosis of the Libyan creative environment: "Fear of being laughed at is stronger than fear of death." The point was not theatrical. He had watched, repeatedly, capable people abandon work that would have moved the country's visual culture forward because they could not survive the early-stage public criticism. He named the fear explicitly because, in his view, naming it is the precondition for working through it.
Dawaya is the project Ahmed co-founded that has, over seven years, become one of the most stable platforms for Libyan calligraphy and visual identity work. The recurring exhibitions function as both a public showcase and a private school: the artists who present each year are also the ones learning, in semi-public, what works and what does not.
Ahmed was commissioned by the Libyan state to produce the country's Visual Identity Guide — a national design system covering typography, colour, layout, and the visual grammar of state communication. He treated the commission with the kind of seriousness that the document, in most countries, would receive automatically. In Libya, where state design is more often an afterthought, the commission was both a deliverable and an argument: the state has a visual life, and that visual life is one of the things that shapes how citizens recognise it.
He offered a personal periodisation of the post-2011 years in Libya that quietly anchors the episode: 2010 he named as the peak, the last full year before the rupture; 2012 he named as paradise, the brief window of post-revolutionary optimism in which everything still seemed possible; 2014 he named as the break, the year the civil war re-opened and the post-revolutionary project collapsed in on itself.
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He returned more than once to the engineering training as the substrate underneath the design practice. Visual identity work, in his framing, is closer to systems engineering than most designers admit — a body of rules and constraints that produces, when applied repeatedly, a coherent surface. The engineer's discipline of returning to first principles transferred more directly than he had expected.
"Fear of being laughed at is stronger than fear of death." (EP 135)