Hilâl Boutique sign
Contributed by Owen Gardner on Jan 15th, 2024. Artwork published in
circa 1990
.
Photo: Owen Gardner. License: All Rights Reserved.
A now-closed fashion boutique on Berlin-Neukölln’s Karl-Marx-Straße, whose logotype appears to be a sloppy tracing of Via Face Don with improvised diacritics.
3 Comments on “Hilâl Boutique sign”
A Neukölln classic! Thanks for documenting it here, Owen.
I think the shape above the a is not so much a circumflex accent, and rather a decorative crescent – hilal (هلال) is the Arabic word for crescent moon.
I struggled with this—the name on the website has no circumflex, but it is sometimes used in Turkish to indicate a long vowel in an Arabic loan word (the ا in هلال in this case), so it may be that the designer took advantage of this option to make an elegant visual flour
I see! Yes, maybe it’s both; a visual reference to the name and a linguistic device.