Gemma, an Egyptian tile and ceramics brand, held a competition in the spring of 2022 in collaboration with Darb 1718. The competition requested that applicants submit a tile collection proposal for the chance to win prizes for 3 different places, the top one being a chance to produce their collection with Gemma, which I was particularly excited about. Unfortunately (and quite mysteriously), despite waiting to hear back and continuously checking their stories and feed for announcements of the winners, none were ever announced, at least not to my knowledge. And even over a year later, no collections were ever released that gave credit to any designers or collaborators. Disappointing (and slightly fishy) competition aside though, I had a lot of fun creating this collection, and below is the proposal I sent to them.

Mood Board

This tile collection is inspired by the queendom of bees and their relevant elements. I thought they’d be a really interesting theme and motif to explore for this collection due to my general fascination with them, yes, but also as a subtle nod to the current wave of female voices rising in the Middle East, Arab, and Muslim world. Without going too in depth, the early 2020’s have been an extra tumultuous period for females in the Middle East speaking against atrocities done to them and their loved ones, from harassment to FGM to “honour killing” and beyond. Many Arab women were bravely using their platforms to loudly advocate for justice as well as educating the masses, despite the very real danger backlash from such activities could result in. Needless to say, bees are a lesson from nature that women are valuable, intelligent, and more than perfectly capable, even to lead.

All main tiles were proposed to be a size of 25 x 25 cm, and are designed with versatility in mind so that they could function as both wall and floor tiles, and so can be alternated accordingly as desired. The color palette holds variations of colors extracted from bees and honey, and a series of plain tiles in each of these colors is included. In addition, there are some mildly textured tiles with speckles, splatters, and/or a slight vein-like effect. The textures will remain mild to make them practical for use and upkeep, and to also maintain the flexibility of the tiles working for both walls and floors. While there are also illustrated tiles that are meant to be used as accessory tiles, there are several simpler designed tiles which can be alternated between being used as less dominant accessories, or to cover larger areas. The shapes and lines were all taken from the shapes of beehives, the lines in bees’ wings, the speckled nature of pollen, etc. All tiles are included below, and then so are a few roughly created compositions that serve as tile combination ideas.


I had also provided a few notes when submitting my proposal:

- The gold color is intended to be a metallic gold.

- I was initially going to design smaller tiles to create the effect shown in, for example, the 3rd composition. However, I decided to give a tile of the same size the effect of being made up of multiple smaller ones to make the installation process easier when mixing and matching with the other tiles. Now, aligning the tiles will automatically create the pattern of smaller hexagons. 

- I also propose finding a way to make the illustrated bee available as an add-on to the tiles (to be added on over them), as seen in the 2nd composition, in a way unlike directly using a centered- bee tile (if possible). 

- The chosen size is not amongst those suggested on the email, however, it felt the most appropriate, although a 25-30cm size range would still give the same effect.

- As this is just a proposal, it is of course open to editing and tweaking as necessary.

Tiles

Compositions