Al Sabih Marine
2026
Alsabih Marine is one of Kuwait's established marine suppliers. It was founded in 1989 and represents leading marine manufacturers from around the world, with a catalogue of over 12,000 items from more than 150 manufacturers. The range covers boat accessories, kayaks, small and inflatable boats, diving equipment, trailer parts, generators, marine air-conditioning, electrical equipment, winches, ropes, chains and apparel. That is a huge and varied range, and the annual catalog is how customers find their way through it. For the 2026 edition I designed the cover, and the challenge was to make a big, technical inventory feel calm and inviting.
I wanted the cover to sell the feeling of being on the water rather than the hardware. So instead of piling up boats and gear, I built a quiet landscape: a low headland sweeping into a still bay, a round sun hanging over the hills, small clouds drifting past, and bands of wavy lines rolling across the top of the page. A pale curve of shoreline cuts diagonally through the composition and leads the eye down towards the content. The logo sits in a rounded plate at the top, like a harbour sign, with the year and the words "2026 Catalog" set beneath it.
Everything is rendered with a heavy stippled grain that dissolves the blues into white, like sea spray or a risograph print. The palette is a single family of blues, from deep navy to bright cobalt to pale mist, which is both the brand's colour and the colour of the water. I made two versions of the cover from the same illustration. The front is deep and saturated, with a white sun, and reads like the sea in full daylight. The back flips to a pale, airy version with a navy sun and a washed-out sky. The mockup shows both together as one wraparound cover, so the catalog feels like a single scene as you turn it over.
The practical content sits at the bottom, where the water is calmest. Six simple icons act as a menu of the catalog's main sections: Water Sports, Boat Products, Trailer Parts, Diving Gear, Apparel and Safety Gear. They are drawn in one weight and one colour so they read as a family, and the grain on them ties them back to the landscape. The website sits underneath in clean white type on the front cover.
I tested the cover in a mockup against a dry, rocky Kuwaiti-style desert hillside, which makes a nice contrast. Held up in that landscape, the blue cover feels like a window onto the sea, which is exactly the pull a marine brand wants in a country where the water is the escape.
Catalog cover design for Alsabih Marine.