Younger revolutionary customers have benefited from, and re-shaped, a modernised banner business, Mai Samih finds out Slogans and banners were everywhere during and after the revolution. Engineer and calligrapher Gamal Orabi says he wrote most of the banners in Tahrir Square during the revolution. Orabi used the materials that were then available such as plastic, paper and cloth. The banners mostly in demand now are the plastic digital letters, according to Orabi. "Election campaigns all depend on digital computer work. We use them instead of cloth such as the ones in Tahrir Square that had the word 'LEAVE' on it. Before, we used to use cloth with handwritten letters. Digital letters are also found on the advertisements of new shops about to open." "A great deal of what was handmade is now carried out by computers," Orabi says. Computer banners appeared in 2000 and became very popular in 2004. In electoral campaigns, they make what is called a "gate" which is composed of two wooden poles on opposite sides of a street with a banner at the top joining them. "Some businessmen do banners the size of buildings. A campaign could cost millions of pounds," Orabi adds. The size of a campaign depends on the financial ability of a client. In some cases, prices have gone down. According to Orabi, 10 years ago a metre of a banner in digital print would cost LE250. Nowadays, it costs LE30. "This is because there is special machinery for it now. Back in 2000, it was new work that not everyone could easily order; there were about four companies that had this type of machinery. Now, there are thousands of them, especially Chinese, which makes it even cheaper than before. It is now very near the price of a hand written banner on cloth," he explains. Orabi says that a plastic banner has a longer life than those made of other material. It is more flexible in computer designs as it gives calligraphers the liberty to add a picture, an option not available on cloth which has to be handmade and is more expensive. Nowadays, only 20 per cent of banners are cloth. Plastic banners are used more in urban areas than they are in rural areas where there are more calligraphers who can use handwriting, and it is cheaper. At the time of elections, more plastic banners are in demand. Wood is no longer used. When it was used, it was twice the price of a plastic banner. Orabi narrates his daily experiences with the changing messages in the Egyptian banners: "Nowadays, every shop that has a banner written uses the 25 January Revolution as the main theme. So you find, for example, the national flag, a phrase, or some lyrics from a patriotic song. There was once a sign I wrote for a shop that was for special offers that said: Breaking news... A kilo of meat is LE..." Language differs from one time to another but it is the chat language that is spreading in the market. Orabi exemplifies this: "At the time of the Gulf war they used vocabulary like 'sand storm'. The main characteristic of the banner language nowadays is that it is summarised. This is probably because a large portion of customers are youth from different backgrounds." For Orabi, producing work for younger customers also has the characteristic of rapidity. He explains that a machine can produce about 30 metres per hour which amounts to around 600 metres per day. As for cloth banner productivity, it would take two calligraphers to produce 150 metres in 16 to 18 hours.
