Meet the Woman Who is Bringing Out the True Libyan Identity through her Collage Designs: The Graphic Designer Razan Naas

Razan Alnaas is a 22 years old  IT student in web development department at Tripoli University. She is a freelance graphic designer and content creator. She learned to design from a very young age since 2009 when forums were popular at that time and she started to self-learn photoshop on her own. She started small during that time but then the revolution sparked and she stopped working on it but she got back to it in 2016 again. Her main work in designing is utterly through photoshop. Her major work is as a content creator and she worked with multiple companies and organizations, for example,  Huroof advertisement company, Jusoor, HexaConnection, and Momken organization. She works on both visual and written contents.

She focuses on photo collages creation or pop-art through photoshop. Her main concentration is the Libyan identity and you can clearly observe it in her work and it is mainly published on Instagram because she believes that the identity is still not clear to the rest of world. Our culture and history are diverse but they are not apparent to people yet. In terms of art, it still does not show our culture in a rich concentration.

She is interested in Amazigh culture and has focused on it through her photo colleges because even as Libyans, they still don't pay it so much attention. She hopes to make the Libyan Amazigh culture as apparent within the scene as in Morocco and Algeria. Also, due to recent conflict in Tripoli which lasted for about 14 months, from daily bombings, people are dying but there are those who are still trying to show what is occurring in reality and Razan is using art to show this reality. She made a collage to document the killing of the young students from military college in Tripoli and Razan said and I quote:

''if we don't document the reality with art of any form, no one will know what is happening and the suffering people are going through daily because in this way, it will never be forgotten.''

Sometimes, she does not want to make the story fully clear and the idea behind every collage she made is unique and has invested many feelings in them. She created a series for Fasela platform  for writers regarding mental health awareness. Disorder chairs and it talks about the most common mental illnesses in the world and in Libya. She loves this series because, in Libya, people do not fully understand the meaning of mental illness though it exists and has negative and painful symptoms for people who suffer from these illnesses. She came up with the concept and she managed to pull it off as Fasela had a deadline to meet and it made a huge success. She made four designs. She also participated in her work in an exhibition in Benghazi about architecture and art. She used architecture to deliver a specific message. 

Military College Students

Sekkah Road

Sekkah road and Military college are one of the most crucial events through the war on Tripoli, the killing of young students in the college by Haftar strikes and the displacement of people in buildings in Sekkah road who had no place to go and lived in bad and poor conditions as these buildings are not complete yet, and they will be remembered forever. People were having a hard time and as she is displaced with her family, away from her house, she is following the news and people are dying in Tripoli, ''it feels like the end of the world, it is as if life is no longer life in Libya'' said Razan. She wanted the world to know and see what is truly happening in Libya and she uses the English language for people to understand the Libyan crisis from all over the world. ''They represent my authentic feelings'' described Razan when she talked about the collages she made about war, displacement, and death. 

What she hopes to achieve from her collages is to represent the Libyan identity with beautiful visual content and at the same time to deliver the Libyan reality to the rest of Libya but most importantly, to represent the diverse cultures in Libya. There is a story in every historical era in Libya if you follow the historical timeline. She insists on the Amazigh identity and she uses the language with tifinagh alphabets in her designs which you can see in the picture I shared above.

She is supported by family and friends and also on social media, Arabic Pop art is an account on Instagram and it supports her a lot and she has many followers from different countries. Her milestone in this field is to make a recognition of her collages work and people now are already familiar with it and they can tell which design is hers without having a name on it which can show the impact her work has. She received many positive feedback and comments such as ''Collage is Razan and Razan is collage'' her boss told her once and ''When there is Razan, there is collage'' another friend made a comment on her work and she kept these comments as reminders. 

Razan said that the majority of the best designers in Libya are men and the best-known female graphic designers such as Malak Elabbar and Sarah Al Madny.  In general, women are not trying to keep up with the new and current trends and it is keeping them a bit behind and usually men have the passion in the field so her advice for women is to develop their skills and keep up with the current trends to be up to what is occurring. Always keep up with the tutorials available and learn new skills in the programs you use and now the internet is providing everything to learn and make progress. She hopes to see the impact of Libyan female graphic designers soon because she knows that they are capable of bringing diversity within this field.

You can follow Razan on both Instagram and Twitter: razangryffindor and razangryffindor