Neshan 30

The 30th issue of Neshan provided us with the opportunity to review the publication process of the last 29 issues during the past nine years and to predict the future publication process.  We asked ourselves: Where did we begin and where are we standing now? What ideas did we base our work on? How did we proceed with and develop those ideas? How did we coordinate the quality of writing and design? Did we succeed in creating an acceptable balance between presenting graphic design works of today and our heritage? Did we give enough... > more

1. As practitioners in the field of visual communication, communication design and graphic design, we are familiar with the importance of developing unknown and unexpected visual results. We know that we cannot deliver a proposal for a poster which resembles a campaign just simply disseminated. We are aware that it is the deviance from the schematically determined visual preconception, held in the collective memory of a society, that binds the attention of the beholder. 2. Following this line of thought, the new, the unseen or the surprising ... > more

Alireza Mostafazadeh belongs to the fourth generation of Iranian graphic designers. He received his Bachelor’s in graphic design and Master’s in illustration, in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Tehran, where he currently teaches. His business card introduces him as Alireza Mostafazadeh: Advertising, Ideation, Graphic Design, Copywriting, Education. To begin, it should be made clear that Mostafazadeh neither swims with the current nor against it; he carefully examines the movement of the water, creates a new stream side by side... > more

It is said that if someone is born with a particular malady, he or she gets used to that malady and it becomes part of their being. The maladies and problems of Persian fonts have a similar story; they suffered a malady since the introduction of litho print and thereafter in the age of lead fonts. Although Iranians returned to the use of litho print for some time (due to an attachment to Nastaligh font), this problem continued well into the pre-digital age, and no one imagined that there would be a cure.  Even after the widespread use of... > more

We have all forgotten the moment in which we first recognized ourselves in a mirror. We did not reflect on this unusual encounter, rather realized that the image in front of us acted in perfect synchronization with our body—at a time when we lacked full coordination. Although we did not have control over this body image, soon we developed a libidinal relationship with the image of ourselves. We learned to move fluently and please our picture; but a gap remained. To this day, we fail again and again in fully harmonizing our visual appearance in... > more

The projects of the design studio Claudiabasel have over the years become a pleasant experience for the visually-aware residents of Basel (a city located at the northern region of Switzerland). The work of the studio has gained national and international recognition throughout the design community, due to an approach that’s derived from the Swiss graphic design heritage of the 1960s’, and is different enough to overcome expected stereotypes. Taking a closer look at the processes of their work, especially the cultural posters designed by... > more

Gregory Vines was born in 1946 in Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1953, like many other children in the US, he started a series of drawings directly on the TV screen (Winky Dink and You Show). His first 8mm film was made for an experimental design class taught by Muriel Cooper, at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. He received his BFA in 1968 and went on to work for publishing companies in Boston. In the early 70s he began his studies in the Advanced Class for Graphic Design at the then Kunstgewerbeschule Basel (KGS). He later started ... > more

Anton Stankowski (1906–1998) belongs to the leading graphic designers of the second half of the 20th century, having made important, individual contributions not only in various areas of visual communication, but also in the field of art. His career, beginning in the late 1920s, spans across more than fifty prolific years, interrupted only during the instabilities of World War II and his war imprisonment. In his work, Stankowski connects, invents and enhances design and art with a unique and recognizably signature style.   In 1929, after... > more

The main research question of my dissertation, which I concluded in 2011 at the University of Granada (Spain) focused on discovering how qualitative diagrams — those visualisations that express non-quantitative relationships between their elements — generate their meaning. In order to answer this question, an adequate methodology had to be found. A practice-led approach, where the theme of inquiry could be explored through image-production itself, was considered useful. The specific methodology described by Michael Renner as “Practice-Led... > more

Helfried Hagenberg is one of the few artists who have experienced making sculpture with paper. This is a completely different experience from whatever we have known before.  A while ago, I read a news in AGI website about the publication of Helfried Hagenberg’s book Book Sculptures and saw some of its very interesting images. I shared this piece of news online as I normally do with tens of others news, tweets and daily posts. Uwe Loesch, however, attracted my attention to his works again by reminding the publication of the book in Germany and... > more