About Osama Khalil
I am a brand designer and community builder. I am Jordanian, I live in Saudi Arabia, and I work in Arabic and English across the MENA region. I build things that bring people together, and I call it BUILD IT HUMAN.
What I do
Three things, and they feed each other. I design brands: visual identities, brand systems, and the strategy underneath them. I build communities: I start them, grow them, and keep them alive between events. I design products: web and mobile interfaces, including my own, which is how I stay honest about deadlines and tradeoffs.
Since 2023 I have been Brand and Community Manager at MeemAin, where I lead design for educational products used by more than 45,000 children aged 7 to 12, including a financial literacy game built with the Saudi Central Bank and Al Ahli Bank. Before that I did brand and go-to-market work at MAZJ and Onex, and spent four years at Zain Jordan building the Zain Innovation Campus programs.
Design Battlefield
In 2018 I started Design Battlefield, a design hackathon where people compete on real briefs, against a clock, in front of a room. It ran for eight editions between 2018 and 2022: posters, packaging, Bauhaus, merchandise, branding, communication design, book design, and finally wall murals in Saudi Arabia.
By the eighth edition it had drawn more than 5,000 attendees, grown a community past 40,000 members, and pulled in participants from Jordan, Egypt, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia. The full story, including the unglamorous years before it, is in the long write-up on the blog.
Before and alongside
I co-founded Design Family in 2015, a design education initiative that ended up serving more than 1,000 designers and earned a fellowship at Badir along the way. I started She Designer to put women designers on stage as speakers, after noticing how few were applying. I brought the Egyptian designer Farid Omara to Amman for a talk that sold out at double the venue's capacity, more than 500 people in the room.
I co-host Ftoor Designer, a podcast for designers and creatives. Ftoor means breakfast, and the show is exactly that: long, unhurried conversations. When the events pause, the conversations keep the community warm.
How I work now
I use AI in brand, design, and marketing work every day, and I think it should make design more human, not less. I ship my own experiments constantly, each one on its own osama.me subdomain, and they are all listed in The Lab. What I learn there goes straight into client work.
If you want to work together, the services and the way I run a project are on Work with me. If you just want to talk, contact me.
The short version
- Brand designer, community builder, and product designer, 7+ years professionally
- Jordanian, based in Saudi Arabia, working across MENA in Arabic and English
- Founder of Design Battlefield: 8 editions, 5,000+ attendees, 40,000+ community members
- 20+ events organized across Jordan and Saudi Arabia
- Co-host of the Ftoor Designer podcast
- Covered by Al-Arabi TV, Ammon News, Amman TV, and other regional media
- Contact: ok@osama.me