Shahee Ilyas

Shahee Ilyas is a Maldivian designer whose work combines graphic design, data visualisation and computer programming. He studied architecture at the University of Oregon (1996–1999) and received a Master of Arts in Media Design (Experimental Publishing) from the Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy, in the Netherlands (2005–2007). He is a PhD candidate at RMIT University in Melbourne and a member of its Digital Ethnography Research Centre.

His Thaana type work dates back to the late 1990s. He designed the Atharu typeface in 2000, Fiyuzu in 2002 and the first version of Fanara in 2008, the same year he published and presented research on Thaana typography. In 2020 he and Ayeshath Fadwa launched Thaana Type, a Maldivian foundry that releases free Thaana fonts under the SIL Open Font License. Fiyuzu was released there in 2020, and he co-designed Bolhu, Fanara, Fanara Golhi, Faagathi Dheli and Faagathi Neon. Fanara Golhi received a Special Mention at the 12th Granshan Type Design Competition (2021/22).

His other work includes 'Flags by Colours' (2007), which shows the world's flags as pie charts of their colour proportions. It was shown at the IEEE Visualization 2007 art exhibition and reproduced in publications such as Data Flow (Die Gestalten, 2008). He has also made census and population visualisations for UNFPA Maldives and analyses of Maldivian election results, and with Ayeshath Fadwa he co-created Nakaiy Nevi (2012), an app for the traditional Maldivian nakaiy calendar.