Welcome to Turbo Studio – Amman’s bustling event venue cum graphic design studio

Saeed Abu-Jaber and Mothana Hussein, the talented duo who founded Turbo Studio, believe that graphic designers can be more than just the creators of logos and images. Mothana tells It’s Nice That: “we feel they can also add something important to the general cultural aspect of a city.” With 15 years of design experience behind them and having become firm friends when the pair met in Beirut, the designers decided to return to their hometown to open a studio in 2015. At first they began casting around for a slick new office space in Amman, but when a friend pointed them towards an old disused garage space in the downtown area of the city, they began to think bigger about the future of their studio and what it could offer the city.

The space hadn’t been used since 1986 and needed a lot of work, but when they saw it they “fell in love”, Saeed tells us. So they pulled in their friend and “legendary Jordanian architect”, Sahel Al Hiyari, to help fix it up. Together they transformed the garages into a dynamic work space and events venue which is now home to a whole host of cultural initiatives, including Turbo’s biannual print sale and a multitude of workshops, screenings and launch events. At one point it even doubled up as a music recording studio when the duo worked on the Amman iteration of New York artist Ted Riederer’s Never Records project. With the tagline “culture not conflict”, Turbo hosted and designed visuals for the record company which brings together people from diverse backgrounds through music.

During the lockdowns of 2020 Turbo took their creativity into the digital realm, co-founding the new online Radio Alhara with a group of friends. The designers’ clear allegiance with the burgeoning music scene in Amman has attracted a range of musical clients. They’ve produced eye-catching posters and logos for a collection of exciting talents and venues like Paradisea records, music curator and DJ Cascou and Pax Cafe. But their diverse portfolio also branches out to intriguing topics like the “role of the UAE’s Environmental Imaginary in Producing Food Security” when they produced the visual identity and exhibition books for the UAE Pavilion in Expo 2020, entitled On Foraging. Their visual identity for Raw Print, a publication based in the Rawdah district of Jeddah, is another highlight. For this project Turbo were inspired by photographs of the district and their design pays homage to the “untouched predominantly Arabic visual identity” of the area.

Turbo by name, turbo by nature, this versatile team is making waves in the Amman design scene and abroad, supporting local cultural events as readily as they produce the slick visuals to accompany them. With so much on their creative agenda, the team have learnt to work efficiently. While they take immense care in understanding the personal tastes of a particular client, they don’t believe in overwhelming them with arduous descriptions about their creative process. Instead they focus their efforts on producing impactful designs which communicate a message clearly. Mothana finishes: “we believe that at the end of the day, once a brand is seen on the street, [...] there will be no one to explain the why and how, but rather, what the brand/visual conveys as soon as a person sees it.”