Dubai Islamic Bank Brand Guidelines: A 1975 Dubai Lender, Noor Bank & the alt Brand

A decree in March, an opening in September.

Dubai Islamic Bank, known by its initials DIB, opened in Dubai on 15 September 1975. The bank’s own history says the decree authorising it was issued on 12 March that year by Shaikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, then Ruler of Dubai, who also opened it in September. English and Arabic Wikipedia name its founder as Saeed bin Ahmed Lootah, a Dubai businessman.

Its premise was a commercial bank run entirely on Islamic principles, and it still presents that as its founding idea: the bank describes itself as the first to apply those principles across all of its practices, a claim The Guardian noted in November 2025. In plain terms, Islamic banking replaces interest-bearing loans with contracts such as leases, cost-plus sales and profit-sharing accounts, and products are reviewed by a board of religious scholars. DIB set up its Sharia and Supervisory Board in 1989, its timeline says.

The early years were spent in Deira and Bur Dubai, the two old trading districts on either side of Dubai Creek. The bank says it opened its first corporate office in Deira in 1977, moved to a new head office there in 1979 and opened its first branch, in Murshid Bazar in Bur Dubai, in 1980. Branches followed in Abu Dhabi in 1982, Al Ain in 1983 and Sharjah in 1991. It introduced cash machines in 1987, issued its first Visa cards in 1991 and became a public joint-stock company in 1992; English Wikipedia says its shares are listed on the Dubai Financial Market.

Four identities in four decades.

DIB’s own timeline sets out its identity changes year by year. It records the launch of a new dual-language logo, in Arabic and English, in 1981; a new corporate identity “developed and introduced” in 1999; another unveiled at its 30th-anniversary celebrations in 2005; and a further new identity introduced at its 40th anniversary in 2015. In 2021 it launched a new positioning under the line #ReadyForTheNew, and in 2023 it launched DIB alt, which it calls a full digital umbrella brand for its digital services. The timeline does not say who designed any of these marks.

Its sub-brands carry names rather than numbers. The bank lists Johara, branches for women only, launched in 2000; Al Islami Private Banking, in 2004; and Wajaha, its wealth-management service, in 2009. Its current website adds banking tiers called Aayan and Mumayyaz. Outside banking, it began sponsoring the Dubai International Holy Quran Award in 1998 and launched its own charitable foundation, the DIB Foundation, in 2007.

Its finance work has touched some of Dubai’s own landmarks. The bank says it arranged an aircraft financing for Emirates in 2003 and, in 2004, a sukuk to help fund the second phase of Dubai International Airport’s expansion. A sukuk is an Islamic finance certificate that gives investors a share in the income of an asset, used where a conventional bond would pay interest.

Abroad, it has built a small group. English Wikipedia lists a wholly owned subsidiary in Pakistan, which the bank says began operating in March 2006; Bosna Bank International in Sarajevo, set up in 2000; a minority stake in Panin Dubai Syariah Bank in Indonesia, which the bank launched in 2017; operations in Kenya, licensed in May 2017 according to Arabic Wikipedia; and a holding in Sudan’s Bank of Khartoum. At home its subsidiaries include Dar Al Sharia, a Sharia legal and financial advisory firm founded in 2008, and the property developer Deyaar, which the bank announced in 2002.

Design and documentation.

Gulf banks present themselves in two scripts at once. Emirates NBD and QNB both pair a short English name with a full Arabic one — QNB’s Arabic name, بنك قطر الوطني, reads simply as Qatar National Bank — so an identity has to work in right-to-left Arabic and left-to-right Latin, often on the same card, sign or app screen. The guides in this series look at marks built from geometric forms or from Arabic calligraphy, at palettes of deep blue, green and gold, and at photography that moves between city skylines and heritage scenes.

They also look at how banks organise what they sell. Retail, private and corporate banking usually sit in separate sections of a bank’s website, and the larger groups add brands of their own: Emirates NBD runs Emirates Islamic as its Islamic bank and Liv as its digital bank, and QNB has launched a digital bank called ezbank in Egypt.

Islamic finance shapes much of that design work. Islamic banking avoids interest, so financing is usually arranged as a sale at an agreed mark-up, a lease or a partnership, and products are reviewed by a board of Sharia scholars. Product pages for Islamic accounts and financing therefore have to explain those structures in plain language.

Banks in the region also tie their brands to national plans and to sustainability. QNB links its sustainability work to Qatar National Vision 2030, according to Wikipedia, and Emirates NBD built a 2026 campaign around Emirati Women’s Day. Brand work now reaches beyond the logo too: in December 2025 QNB launched a sonic identity that blends the oud with modern synthesisers, Gulf Times reported. Each guide sets out what can be checked about one bank — its founding, its mergers and its owners — and treats the palette shown as our own interpretation.

Noor Bank, a merger and a golden jubilee.

The largest change of recent years came with Noor Bank. Noor opened in Dubai in January 2008 as Noor Islamic Bank and dropped “Islamic” from its name in January 2014, English Wikipedia says. Bringing a second Dubai Islamic lender under the same roof, DIB completed its purchase of Noor in January 2020, according to English Wikipedia’s article on DIB; the Noor Bank article and Arabic Wikipedia give December 2019. DIB says it then finished integrating Noor into its own operations during 2020, in 283 days. English Wikipedia describes DIB as the largest Islamic bank in the UAE by assets.

The bank has also been a party to long-running court proceedings in Dubai over a loan made in the 2000s; it has said that the outcome of such cases is a matter for the courts.

In 2025, fifty years after the founding decree of March 1975 and the opening of its first branch that September, the bank marked its golden jubilee, its timeline says, and raised its holding in T.O.M. Group, a digital-banking business in Türkiye, to 25%.

For a design guide, Dubai Islamic Bank shows how a bank can restate its identity at each anniversary, from a dual-language logo in 1981 to a digital sub-brand in 2023. Compare Kuwait Finance House, another Gulf Islamic bank, and Al Rajhi Bank. For this guide we use a deep green and a warm sand with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Dubai Islamic Bank’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.