While visiting the Bauhaus Architecture Center in Tel Aviv, I felt like a kid in a toy shop when scouring through their book shop. I came across a book titled, Hebrew Graphics, which was in conjunction with an earlier exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 1999. What I believed I purchased was an overview of graphic design of Israel’s rich, but young past. But when I returned to home, I was astonished that the entire book was filled with the work of a team of revolutionary brothers in the area of branding a new country.

Brothers Gabriel and Maxim Shamir played an important role in the visual design of the state of Israel’s symbolic sphere, and where among the most conspicuous creators among the iconography representing the history of the country’s formative years. Their work was an integral part of the social apparatus aimed at rendering unity though identification, whether when it crystallized as an ideological appeal or when it served as marketing needs. Aside from being a part of an entire generation, the work of the Shamir Brothers undertook tasks of formalizing the symbols of Israeli sovereignty and independence - the State’s emblem, currency notes, medals and stamps, establishing recruitment myths and disseminating collective goals pertaining to the governmental practice, such as the call for inhabitants to move out of the city and into the country, accounting for the food rationing (tzena policy, the battle against the black market, and the like. —Batia Donner, guest curator for the Hebrew Graphics -Shamir Brothers Studio Exhibition

In 1935 the Shamir Brothers opened their studio on 84 Rothschild Blvd, Tel Aviv. (13 years prior to the establishment of the state of Israel). I’m fascinated with the idea of two brothers having such a long lasting impact for the branding of one country from its infancy to the modern day.

(I plan to research more on this subject and and elaborate on this entry in the future)