Morcos Keys community-based design strategy
"In Alabama, like many artists, I used to do arts and crafts on the kitchen table with their parents. I have a twin named Jarrett, so that's what we'd do," recalls Jon Key, half of Morcos Key design studio. Crafts evolved into instruments , Song and theater. Growing up in Seale, Alabama, he learned his love for music and the arts and discovered that there are endless ways to express yourself.
When Key was around ten years old, he received a book on HTML and was drawn to the idea of converting language into another visual form. He ended up studying at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), which "was not diverse and very stifling in terms of the conversations that took place," he says. “While at RISD, I really wondered what it was like to be a graphic designer. What does it mean to be a designer from Alabama? What does it mean to be a designer from the south? What does it mean to be a designer who is black? "
At RISD he crossed paths with Wael Morcos, co-founder of the studio. Morco's favorite toys grew up in Lebanon, on the other side of the world, and like Key's, were based on handicrafts. When he started thinking about a creative career, he was drawn to graphic design as it seemed to involve an amalgamation of disciplines.
He graduated from Notre Dame University in Lebanon with a degree in graphic design, followed by four years in the branding and design department of Saatchi Beirut, where he started working on multilingual identities, which sparked his interest in Arabic typography. After a few years he decided to study for a master's degree at the RISD. "(Jon) was a student, I was in the graduate program, but at one point he hung out in the doctoral studios more than his," recalls Morcos. "We've started working together on a lot of things since then, and eventually they both moved to New York."
Above: Black Futures, OneWorld, Penguin Random House, 2021. Above: The tenth magazine