As part of FIDO contents, we’re gathering here some women designers to talk about some of their works. The Digging into design section aims to focus on the method and the strategy to approach a design project, presenting specifically the ideas that stand behind it and the step-by-step.

Mahsa Gholinezhad is a graphic designer, art director, and co-founder of Studio Melli, an independent graphic design practice based in Tehran and Rotterdam. Over the years, by focusing on multilingual typography, she has been working on numerous local and international projects in the fields of editorial, publication, book design, magazine design, poster design, visual identity, and event design.Her main focus is to design high-detailed and multi-layered typographic works for cultural-artistic projects through experimentation on the forms of Persian and Latin letters. Her works have been published in local and international festivals, books, and magazines such as étapes and Bi-Scriptual. In addition to her personal artistic activities and graphic design projects, Mahsa Gholinezahad has been conducting experimental workshops independently as a typography teacher in various conservatories and art academies in Tehran in recent years

For this new feature of Digging into design we had the chance to talk with her about AASSTTIINN, one of her biggest projects in which she worked on for several years, “a project with tight deadlines and many challenges, which has taken up a lot of thought, time and bunch of design work.” AASSTTIINN (meaning sleeve in Persian) is an online fashion and lifestyle store, and Mahsa, apart from her work and role as a graphic designer, had several responsibilities in this project, such as art direction, design direction and visual identity development, “being constantly in cooperation with different departments of the AASSTTIINN teams, each of which had a different request and need respect to design. Pretty much work in pretty little time, the main reason to call this project challenging.” 

She then went on explaining to us about her practice and the influence of her background, fundamental in all her projects and especially in this one, underlying that, according to her interests and the focus of the studio, she always researches and plays at the intersection of art and design. Her cultural background, Persian art, and history have a key role to bring a fresh idea based on typography and strong visual concepts. In a way, it was quite easy and natural find the inspiration to start working on AASSTTIINN:

The project moved its first steps in 2015 and 2016 with a few short meetings, and it’s still in progress. “It started with a very simple brief, as a local brand. But the future of the project had a fast and vibrant path ahead, expanding its activities as a bigger concept store and online store working with Iranian and foreign designers around the globe”, she added. The project involved not only designing a visual identity for the fashion platform, but also creating all the packaging items, designing products, posters, events communication, and develop many more related interactive designs for websites and social media.”Gradually, over time, the platform began to introduce new young talented Iranian designers and then tried to expand the range of its offer, adding new products like accessories, jewelry, home decor, and also visual arts”. Therefore, each time, the visual identity had to take on a new form for each new campaign, and we can find a lot of different visuals related to AASSTTIINN but the whole system is solidly based on the main concept. “For me this project always was a playground to make and bring new things from the basic identity,” she adds.

As for color palette, in the first stage the main colors of AASSTTIINN visual identity were only black and white, with a hint of fluorescent orange color (Pantone 805) interrupting the binary structure, “beside the neutral colors, which gave a strange glow and sharpness and feeling to the designs” Mahsa explained. The aim was to create a simple but impressive color harmony “with a color palette that is a bit unrepeatable and unusual for a brand. According to our idea, the main colors of the visual identity are always next to the colors of projects and campaigns. Each campaign found its own color palette depending on the style of each designer or the final product we wanted to introduce.”

Mahsa told us that in this particular project, most of the initial ideas and thoughts were welcomed by the client, but she admits that, in general, in any design project there may be disagreement on some ideas. “Sometimes it may be necessary to look at that part of the work from another angle, if the client’s opinion is conscious and based on the accuracy and direction of the project improvement, not because of personal taste.” The designer goes on explaining that with commission work but also personal projects, this is a very instructive experience.

The project is still ongoing, but the goals and plans of the brand have been reshaped in some way, and some parts of the project have changed a bit recently. “A few months before, I started training a new young intern and assistant to play some part in this game as an in-house team for the brand. Our collaboration with this project will change in the future. Let’s see what happens” she said.

To conclude, we couldn’t help but ask her what she likes the most about this project:

And once again we came to an end! That’s all for this chapter, we thank Mahsa very much for the beautiful project and all the details she shared with us about AASSTTIINN. Stay tuned for more.

*** All the images are property of ©MahsaGholinezhad, you’ll need her explicit permission to reproduce them 🙂