4KEZ — Kez Khaled, Creative Director & Brand Designer
4KEZ
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4KEZ Kez Khaled
Creative Director
4KEZ
Instagram Behance Bragi Studio
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Nineteen years of making things that {{ verb }}

Kez Khaled — creative director, brand designer, digital artist. Half of the day is strategy, grids and packaging dielines. The other half is fire, myth and thirty layers of a South-Arabian queen who never sat for a photograph. Both halves are the job.

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Bilingual by default
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Alinma Bank✳Volkswagen Group✳Schwarzkopf✳Amazon✳wooow.ai✳Syoss✳Al Baraka Capital✳Yemen Embassy — Cairo✳Sila Homes✳Puvana✳ Alinma Bank✳Volkswagen Group✳Schwarzkopf✳Amazon✳wooow.ai✳Al Baraka Capital✳Yemen Embassy — Cairo✳Syoss✳Puvana✳
Selected work

Six that explain
the rest.

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Digital art
Part one
The Art

Twenty-two composited worlds pulled out of South-Arabian myth — kings, queens, a lost island, and two of them now moving.

 Brand work
Part two
The Brands

Identity, packaging, campaigns and product for food, finance, aviation and media.
New — the stills, in motion
The plates started
moving.

Two of the composites are now animated — same layers, given time. Watch one long enough and the construction gives itself away.

▶
How it goes

Four moves,
no theatre.

I run small and direct. You talk to the person doing the work — start to finish, brief to print file.

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Interactive · 4 plates

The Darkroom

Every piece I make starts as a dead plate and a pile of layers. Pick the right three and the image resolves. Pick wrong and you burn a frame. Four plates, three lives each — finish all four and something opens up.

Load the first plate →
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The archive

Work

Identity, packaging, campaigns and product. {{ projectCount }} projects here — the rest is under NDA or not good enough to show.

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The brief, honestly

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Personal work · {{ artCount }} pieces

The Art

Photo-manipulation, built the slow way — twenty to forty source frames per piece, matched by hand for light, grain and lens. Most of it comes out of South-Arabian history: kings whose faces are guesses, an island that photographs like a rumour. This is the half of the work nobody commissions, and the reason the commissioned half is any good.

2015
First piece I still show
Photoshop
Only tool, no generation
40h
Average per plate
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Hand-composited in Photoshop. No generated imagery.
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The Darkroom

Resolve the plate

Three correct layers bring the image up. A wrong layer burns a frame — three burnt and the plate resets. Four plates in the tray.

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Misfires
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All four plates resolved

You have the eye.

That is genuinely the whole job — knowing which three of six things belong in the frame, and being willing to burn the ones that do not. If you got here you were paying attention, so here is the door that skips the queue.

Misfires: {{ gMisfires }} — lower is better, but nobody is counting except me
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Six layers on the bench. Three belong to this image. Trust the subject, not the colour.
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You picked the three layers this image is genuinely built from. In the real file there are another thirty underneath doing the quiet work.

Or see the finished piece
About

Kez
Khaled

— just Kez, or 4kez

I have never had a design education and I stopped apologising for it around year six. What I have is nineteen years of shipping — packaging that went to press, liveries that flew, feeds that ran daily for years, and a personal practice that keeps my eye from going commercial.

Today I run Bragi Studio. Small on purpose: you brief me, I do the work, you get me on the phone when the printer calls at eleven at night. I work in English and Arabic, and I care about the Arabic as much as the English — which, in this region, is still not the default.

One page, no cover letter attached. The deck opens in a new tab and prints to PDF.
Kez Khaled, creative director and brand designer
Kez
The road

Nineteen years,
four chapters.

Now
CEO & Founder — Bragi Studio
Brand, packaging, campaign and product for clients across the Gulf, Egypt and Europe.
2021 — 2025
Media Management — Ahmed Fathi
Full visual output for a touring artist: posters, releases, tour identity and a daily feed across four years.
2019 — 2021
Senior Director — Puvana
Ran the creative floor. Learned how to say no to a client and keep them.
2015 — 2024
Head of Production — Yemence
Where the volume happened — and where I learned that a system beats a good idea.
01
Self-taught, on purpose

Nobody taught me the rules, so I had to learn why they exist. That turns out to be more useful than knowing them.

02
Arabic is not an afterthought

Most bilingual systems are an English system with Arabic bolted to the side. I draw both, and usually the Arabic first.

03
The art pays the brand work back

Forty hours inside one image teaches you what light does. Clients get that for free.

Capabilities

What I actually do all day.

Brand strategy & positioning
Logotype & custom lettering
Packaging & print production
Bilingual EN / AR type systems
Campaign & art direction
UI / UX & design systems
Photo-manipulation & retouch
Social systems & motion
Worked with
Alinma Bank
Volkswagen Group
Schwarzkopf
Amazon
Syoss
Al Baraka Capital
Yemen Embassy — Cairo
wooow.ai
Puvana
Regional media network — daily output
Saudi NowQatar AlaanOman AlaanEgypt NowIraq AlaanKuwait AlaanMorocco AlaanLebanon NowEmaraat AlaanSahraa TimesAl-Jamhouria TVAden Al-Ghad Saudi NowQatar AlaanOman AlaanEgypt NowIraq AlaanKuwait AlaanMorocco AlaanLebanon NowEmaraat AlaanSahraa TimesAl-Jamhouria TVAden Al-Ghad
Contact

Say the thing.

Tell me what you are making and roughly when it has to exist. I answer everything real inside two working days — including the ones I have to turn down.

Direct channel — no database, no newsletter
Carry the ember to the lamp
Drag it all the way across. It keeps the machines out — no captcha, no tracking, nothing sent anywhere.
Lamp lit — channel open
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This opens your own mail app with everything filled in. Nothing leaves this page until you press send yourself.
Locked
It is in your outbox.

Your mail app should have opened with the whole thing written. If it did not, my address is now visible on the right — copy it and write to me directly.

Go back to the work
Direct address
hidden@until.unlocked
The address is not written anywhere in this page's code — it gets assembled only once the lamp is lit. That is the whole anti-spam system, and it works better than a filter.
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Also on WhatsApp at +32 460 22 03 00 — Belgium time, but I keep Gulf hours more often than I should.
Good to know
—Booking new identity work from {{ bookingMonth }}. Small pieces and prints, sooner.
—Write in English or Arabic. Both get the same answer speed.
—If you have a budget range, say it. It saves us both a week.
—Recruiters and agencies welcome. Crypto pitches are not.
Before you write
If you want the credentials first, take them — no form, no email gate.