Guest: Morcos Key

Many facets of fear and love have been uncovered in this issue, from how these emotions play major roles in political campaigns, to how AI has a fear-love dynamic that can unfold in many different ways. We’ve also explored how a city can be feared and loved simultaneously, with love ultimately conquering fear. 

These articles also taught us how fear and love work separately and together: When people are close to each other physically, culturally, or in terms of values, love and fear can coexist, whereas when people and societies are distant, these emotions are less likely to come together or interact.

In this Perspective piece, Wael Morcos and Jon Key, partners of Morcos Key, generously share their thoughts on Fear and/or Love in design and visual communication. Morcos Key has just celebrated eight years since its founding, and was named one of the “25 Creative Studios Inspiring Us the Most in 2025”¹, in an article highlighting the studios whose work is making the greatest impact. 

Impact in visual communication is created when visuals speak directly to our emotions. Fear and Love are foundational emotions for us as humans, so we felt naturally drawn to reach out to Morcos Key, to offer you, our readers, the perspectives of two of today’s most influential designers.

Wael Morcos grew up and completed his undergraduate studies in design in Lebanon. He came to the U.S. to pursue his master’s at RISD² in Providence, Rhode Island. That experience allowed him to reflect on his practice and explore questions that mattered. After RISD, he moved to New York, working at studios such as C&G Partners³ and Base Design⁴. He also spent a year freelancing with renowned companies such as IBM, Apple, and other design studios. 

Jon Key is from Seal, Alabama. Growing up with his twin, Jarrett, their mother set up arts and crafts tables at home, and that early play led him to explore theater, music, and visual experimentation. Around age 10, he discovered HTML coding and loved turning text into interactive visuals. Through high school, he realized graphic design could be a career path and went on to study it at the SCAD⁵ Summer Seminar, then RISD for Pre-college and undergrad. While at RISD, he did extensive theater work at Brown University⁶, making posters, producing shows, and designing, which shaped his freelance mindset early on. After moving to New York, Jon worked in advertising while freelancing on arts, packaging, and art direction projects. 

Wael and Jon had already begun collaborating at RISD on projects, theater posters, and class assignments. After freelancing, they formalized their partnership and launched their studio, Morcos Key, focusing on arts and culture work, which they see as the heart of their practice.

How do fear and love reveal themselves in the works you’ve created?

Jon: For my painting practice, fear and love are such a great synopsis. I originally started painting after the Orlando nightclub shooting⁷, which was in 2016. At that point, it was the most brutal American mass shooting. 49 people died. So for me, it really brought to life the questions: 

“…Where do we go as Black and Brown queer folks and feel safe?” 

“…How do I exist as a Black queer person in the world when I walk on the street?” 

There were a lot of tensions and anxieties I was feeling. And I think when I immediately started doing those paintings – especially at the beginning – they were really about trying to find agency and control of my body. The original paintings show a figure contorting to these rectangular compositions, the body morphing to fit the space. There was always a stare back at the viewer that proclaimed his humanness, proclaimed his agency. There was always a Black Power Fist, with the other hand always open. 

As I've been doing those paintings – which, again, were coming out of a place of anxiety – I've started to grow as a person and learn more about myself, and the paintings have started to shift and change. I really felt parts of the paintings were about questioning. The gesture of a contorted head and the leaning, this kind of cocked head, is a movement I make when I'm questioning something. That gesture of questioning then evolved into one of leaning, community building, support and love. 

For me, it’s about how fear, anxiety, being able to question, being able to show love can all be performed in one body. At the same time, these elements inform how we navigate space and build community.

Wael: Most of my practice has been centered around the studio and my relationship with the industry and the type of work I do. I do, however, engage in personal projects, which take the form of blankets I design. A lot of my work stems from my experience as an immigrant. I think fear and love are both deeply ingrained subconscious feelings that we all have and operate from, whether we are aware of it or not. Everyone feels a little insecurity, which may be translated or identified as fear. The way I process this is by focusing on the other side of the equation, by mitigating fear, by trying to communicate the love part of things. This is where the blankets that I designed tend to operate. 

To me, a blanket is an element of positivity, of an embrace, of a moment of relaxation, of a moment of dreaming. It’s a moment of regression to a childhood state, a parental embrace, a detachment from the reality or insecurities of the present moment. That's where the symbolism of the blanket itself becomes quite interesting to me. Objects are silent, but when you put typography on them, you're giving them a sort of voice that speaks to you. I like this transcendent ability of objects to take you to a dream world, just by imagining what they might say. The blanket is definitely an element of our childhood. In a way, everything around us becomes an imaginary friend. So maybe – if I think deeply about why I like to put typography on these blankets – it’s probably related to these deep-rooted feelings of fear and love, about trying to combat one with the other. 

The blanket with “Beirut” written on it symbolizes a love-fear relationship. Another blanket features a collection of flower names from the Levant region. Flowers themselves are symbolic objects. It's almost like gifting someone flowers arranged in a pseudo-bouquet – a composition of type on the blanket itself. It creates a sort of landscape of flowers to wrap yourself in. 

There's another one with the title “يالله تنام” ( Yalla tnam – “Go ahead and sleep”). It represents a mother soothing her child, inviting them to sleep. There’s also one titled “فوق النخل” (Fawq al-nakhl – “Above the palm trees”), based on an Iraqi song originally titled “فوق إلنا خال” ( Fawq elna khal - “Above us is a friend/loved one”), meaning we have a kindred spirit up there for us. Over time, the title changed to “Above the palm trees”. Either meaning is lovely to me, whether you’re longing for a kindred spirit or whether you're just floating above the palm trees. 

The more I talk about it, the more I realize that much of my work operates within that dream and the desire to recreate love, possibly through these objects. There's one that says “Beirut in my heart”. So again, the words themselves don’t say 'love', but they are definitely expressions of love for the city I grew up in.

So far, you’ve talked about how love shows up through fear in your work without maybe realizing it. Can you give a concrete example of a time when you consciously translated fear or love into your work? For instance, how you approached a piece thinking, ‘Now I need to translate love (or fear), how do I do it?’

Jon: One piece from the live exhibition I had in New York was called “Second Goodbyes”. When you’re at a party and everyone leaves, the people who stay are your closest friends – and then you say goodbye to them too. There’s a big painting of all of my friends sitting on this couch together. I’ve also done many paintings featuring two, three people, or a group nestled together, overlapping and overflowing on top of each other. 

The work did start from this place of anxiety and tension, but a lot of my recent work has been about: 

“How do we create more joyful images, especially when thinking about experiences usually projected onto Black and Black queer folks?”

A lot of the work also responds to events that were happening in the world at the time of these paintings. The Black Lives Matter movement⁸, police brutality, and other events were unfolding alongside the idea of this mass shooting. And then, of course, Covid happened in 2020. These events made me realize that community and people coming together are often taken for granted, yet they are powerful, important, and necessary. 

In general, all of my practices stem from writing. Writing and research are critical for me. Being able to work with the client, write up a brief, and craft language is really important before beginning a process. For painting, it’s important to write from what I'm feeling in the moment, and allow the paintings to represent that feeling. 

Now, I'm taking the paintings in a different direction than some of the works I've done in the past, and I'm really excited about that. The paintings I used to make served me. I grew so much from them and learned to love myself through those processes. But now it's time to explore territories I don't normally talk about or bring up.

Wael: I don't know if there’s a brand identity where the client's desire is to be that vulnerable and put this vulnerability out there. There have been some clients – a florist and a designer – where the design needed to be lyrical or appeal to a sense of romanticism or a sense of sophistication, whether graphically, formally, or visually, but not necessarily be a brand about love itself. Similarly, typefaces tend to be tools for others to typeset content. The typeface could, again, be lyrical, alluding to a handwritten quality that immediately signals the presence of the hand, the person, the human, the closeness of that connection. But in branding and type design, for qualities like fear and love to be requested feels like an indulgence of emotion that many brands don't pursue these days. Branding is more about being clear and professional, and if anything, exciting, interesting, experimental or quirky. 

Editorial work, however, has more room to tell personal, complex stories – where personal experiences are welcomed, individual voices are highlighted, and, in things like online blogs or magazines, there's room for emotions and personhood to be elevated. I think Jon can talk about the work we've done for The Tenth Magazine⁹, which I think does highlight and echo these voices. 

From my end, I could mention one project we did for Mizna¹⁰, a newsprint that highlights the voices of Arab queer poets and writers from around the Middle East. It was created in remembrance of Sarah Hegazi¹¹, the Egyptian activist who was exiled and eventually committed suicide in Canada. That’s a project where I think both fear and love are very much at the center of the newsprint, at the center of the desire to be heard and seen. 

Mizna and the client came to us wanting to produce a poetry booklet – something interesting and cute that could sit on a shelf. But we wanted to take more space and offer the reader a more present experience. We didn't want to make it this convenient little booklet you could read in a corner and then hide it away. So we proposed a newsprint that, when you open it, is almost uncomfortable, and hard to flip through and fold. It's not something you can easily unfold and read in a subway or at the beach. You need to stop what you're doing, open it, and engage with it – it becomes a large visual. We proposed a newsprint as a gesture of taking space. The first step for fear and love to be acknowledged is for writers contributing to be heard, and to take space to express them.

The newsprint also engages with typography and layout. It started with the understanding that poets are very particular about how they write. They may decide to return to the line, break the line, or start with an indent because the meaning or the rhythm says so. They might want a large space in the middle of a line. So it's not like designing a catalog or an essay where they would send a Word document and you place the text into a grid. All these requirements – of being heard, of wanting to express longing, hurt, fear, love, pain – were the ingredients that shaped the design and gave it its form.

The poems are arranged almost like a puzzle. Some are positioned on the side, while others follow a column grid. The illustrations and lettering that accompany these poems are also ingredients shaping how the poems are visually expressed. We worked with studio.mnjnk and Haitham Haddad¹², an illustrator from Palestine, who added a beautiful layer of lyricism to the piece. I did lettering throughout, combined with an illustration on the cover. The middle of the newsprint featured a full poster people could hang, all complemented by more straightforward text-setting typography. So it's typography, lettering, and illustration coming together in this kind of beautifully messy grid, if you will. 

That was definitely a project where love and fear kept coming up because of the visceral nature of the poetry. I don't see love and fear in signage, or necessarily in branding, where emotions are on full display. We live in a world where emotions are expected to be disciplined before they’re communicated to someone else, which is quite interesting. 

Jon: The Tenth Magazine was a Black Queer fashion and lifestyle magazine. I first learned about them in 2013 when I saw a Facebook ad that basically said: “Black, Gay, Unbothered. Order today!” I clicked on it and thought, What is this? I'd never seen a Black gay magazine done in this way before, so I ordered it. I got it in the mail about a week later, and I was crying. It was amazing. I immediately emailed them, and basically said: “I need to work with you”. I had just graduated RISD, and I've been working with the team ever since, designing this magazine.

There were probably five or six issues of The Tenth Magazine, and we designed two, three or four of the covers and interiors. What was really amazing about this project was that it was made out of love – no one got paid. For me, it was an opportunity to work within a community of Black queer creatives, from writers to editors, photographers, and illustrators. That was a critical space: first, to meet these people, and second, to work on design that truly reflected my community – the people around me, the ones I wanted to see more of in the world. 

It also allowed me to get a lot of other projects. I tell most people: your personal projects show what you love, what you want to do more of, and what you want to see more of in the world. Typically, those are the projects that people gravitate toward and identify with. 

Lastly, when you hear the words fear and love, what’s the first visual or visuals you think of that are not designed by you?

Jon: A lot of things come to mind, like the “I Love New York” logo¹³. I think about visual aids work, or like the Pink Triangle¹⁴, which started out of fear and then became a symbol of protest. I think protest is a space of love, where you're trying to make the world a better place.

One poster I think about is the Another Mother for Peace poster titled “War is not healthy for children and other living things”¹⁵. I love this poster! This poster acts out of a space of both fear and love, even in the way it's drawn – crude, childlike, innocent, but also grotesque at the same time. 

Another example I mention in my book Black, Queer, & Untold¹⁶. There’s a lithograph from 1836 by Henry R. Robinson¹⁷ of this Black trans woman named Mary Jones. It was titled “The Man-Monster”. I love that there's a super beautiful rendering of her – gorgeous! I'm sure she looked nothing like this, but she probably was gorgeous, as many newspapers mention her fashion and dress. People loved her, but they also hated her, were disgusted by her. And I love this print because it showcases both of those worlds. 

The book, Black, Queer, & Untold was released November 2024, and looks at Black queer histories from the 1800s to today through the lens of graphic design ephemera – lithographs, posters, magazines, postcards – all serving as containers for these Black queer histories and stories. In that, there was a lot of navigation between not having agency, being fearful of expressing yourself, yet doing it anyway. As time progresses, even through print, you can see the resistance, agency and love pouring out for these communities. Print, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, became such a lifeline for disseminating information.