2008/ / LAST

Hi, it s 31st of December 2008. it s couldy in Tehran and i m sitting in my room, having coffee. i have to finish my project as soon as posible but i dont like to do that now. it s one of those days that i remember that famous poem
گاهی دلم برای خودم تنگ می شود
... forget about it.
it s the last day of December. the last day of the year 2008. i received a very nice SMS today, it says:
2009 is at the door!

Remember;

life is short

break the rules

forgive quickly

kiss slowly

love truly

laugh uncontrolablly

and never regret anything that made you smile :)

so let's forget everything- HAPPY NEW YEAR :D

Now after Travel

well i m working on my dissertation now, it s defined in 4 chapters;
1- the difinition of poster
and the difiniation of carafts
2-Iranian Handicrafts status
The Iranian Handicraft posters during last decade
3-The symbols and graphical signs
Minimalism and post modernism
4-The visual elements of:
Iranian Pottery
and Iranian Qlims

i ve almost finished the first two chapters and i m supposed to finish the rest of it in 2 months :)
I m hardly working ... ;)

The 5th Day

Thursday morning was free for us to go shopping. we all went to the "mall of Emirates" abig shopping mall near the hotel. ofcourse much better than Burjuman, so that students like us could find things there for buying. i bought a "1-million" perfume from "Paco- Rabanne" for myself!!! since i love the men perfumes :D Later on when i returned iran i found that this pefume is very famous but when i was there i bought it bcz i just loved the smell! and could never imagine that it s this much famous!!! u dont belive but when i saw it i didnt like its package design but now when i pay more attention i see well it s not that much bad! ;)
in the evening the most important part of the Ibdaa award was about to happen; the Gala Dinner. It was a very formal dinner party in which one of the Emirates prince came with his governers. and the sponsers of Ibdaa awards all gathered in DMC to give the finla finalists their prizes and ofcourse a small statue of Ibdaa butterfly. The Gala Dinner was originally held by Galadari (which i ve heard that are originally iranian)the most powerful sponser of Ibdaa.
There were supposed to be just 1 person selected among others in any category. the selected person would receive 1 month internship with one of the sponsers and 4000$ award from Nikon for the digital photography part. A friend of mine called "Ganesh" from India won the graphic design award and from Iran another friend "Roqieh Tavakoli" won the prize for her film about iranian carpet in the Tv/Film feature category. :)
the day after that we were free again for shopping and on Friday night at 10:10 p.m we flyed to Doha again in order to return home. :) The journey was finished but lots of new friends came into my life. we are in contact via facebook now and i learned so many things and first of them was that "i need to learn more".

The 4th day

on Wednesday 26th of November they took us for a tour of Dubai. First we went to the persian gulf beach where "Burj Al Arab" is build exactly in front of a very nice hotel called "Atlantis" and the yare both located on "palm Jumeirah" (one of the most famous palms of Dubai- the center one ). since Burj Al Arab's enterance was rather expensive we just took a look from far! and took pictures by the seashore.then we went to Dubai Museum. They really had nothing compare to iranian museums!!! i just took a look & came out! then we had launch in DMC in the open area. it was really nice. and they gave us our certificates after launch. WEll i think i liked to receive my certificate in a more formal ceremony. May be it was better that gave it to us in the Gala dinner before thir highness came. (:?)
in the evening we went to AL Qoze Bowling center and played for 3 hours! very fantastic.we all enjoyed it :D

The 3rd Day

It was another nice day. we went to CNBC building & visited different parts of it. There were a lot of equipments and everything was really professional. when i asked the Graphic Design part that what kind of software they work with they answered "All Adobe products! & even Maya" wow!!!
so i needed to learn more & more, there r still more Adobe products that i dont know. That day i decided to improve my skills and learn new graphical softwares.
we went to MBC channel too but very short bcz of the lack of time, then we returned to DMC (Duabi Media City) and went to a nice, expensive shopping center called Burjuman center.
well nice shopping center with different traditional & modern decorations and nice coffee shops and restaurants.Famous brands & ofcourse very expensive,so not a suitable place for students!
After shopping center they took us to a cruise for dinner. It was another dreamy night. floating on the "Persian Gulf" waters listening to music and letting the wind coddling ur hair :) i loved it. and a real delicious dinner on tables lighted with small blue candles in a romantic atmosphere was something i ll never forget.

The 2nd Day

We went to Duabi Media City (DMC) in the morning. It is a real nice place. A complex of different bulidings and a wide area with flowers and central pool. You can find CNN,mbc,CNBC and many other channels there. They all own huge buildings in the Media City.And Our Exhibition was held on the pool !!!!
yea there were a wooden bridge over the pool which was covered by a white cloth temporary.All the posters, photos and journalistic reports were hanged on that temp wall and my poster was among them!!!
The film & TV feature showhall was in the other part of the bridge were some televisions were installed to show the students's films.
We had a graet! launch in DMC and went back to hotel to go to Desert Safari.
"Desert Safari" was a very nice part of our travel. they took us to desert, we took photos, rided Camels, had dinner & watched Arabic Dance all in a dreamy evening in Desert! i can never forget that night. In Desert Safari there were a young lady who drawn on the peoples's hands by Henna !!! and look it s me with an eastern ornamental on my hand! :D

Flying to Dubai

The 1st day
The flight was at 4:40 a.m Sunday morning 23rd of November from Tehran to Doha by Qatar Airways. The Iranian group was consist of 8 Students from different universitys. 2 of my friends were selected for digital photography, 2 for TV-Film feature/2 for TV Docuemtray/1 for analoge Photography and i was the only student who was selected for Graphic design category among other iranians.
After arrivning in Dubai Airport a driver were waiting there to take us to StarMetro Hotel. It was a nice hotel-apartment.
our chaperones "Imran Cheema" & "Sally Yassine" invited us to the main room for more information about the plan of the festival. Then we had launch and stayed in hotel till the end of the night bcz they asked us not to go out so that we could be lost!!! ;)

Ibdaa awards

:D in iranian calender it was 87/8/7! i received a phone call from Dubai and found out my poster has been accepted in the "Ibdaa awards" student competition!
well it was not my 1st exhibition but the nice part was that those whose works were accepted in exhibition were all invited to Dubai for a week by Dubai Media City host!
yooooooohoooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!
;)

Beauty and the Beast1

while studying in the 2nd term of M.A one of my friends asked me to design a poster for her puppet show named "Beauty and the beast". The story was like Disney's. The bad character had a limited time to find a kind heart and in the last minutes of the show it happens and he turs into a kind charachter when the last petal falls.

After winning the 1st prize

After winning the 15000$ prize in "The 1st world Monotheistic REligions Award" I had more selfconfidence to prove myself as a graphic designer.I designed a project for the museum of Imam Ali which was called "The Imam Ali International painting sypmposium". So many painters were called to send their works by the title of "Justice and Humanism". I chosed sun as the symbol of Justice and it is also in the symbol of Imama Ali in my cuture. so this common sign could lead the viewer to find the diffeent colored rays as different international painters who wanted to show the justice in their paintings. This project was supposed to be published in offset and have billboard and ... but they changed it to digital printed posters and banners for the lack of budget. Anyway it as a nice and enjoyable projetc for me and i still love that big gold sun with its title written by Nastaliq (an Iranian type of calligraphy).

And the Eternal Sunshine!

well, adding to the last poster i upload i sent this one.

again for the "The Unity of the Monotheistic Religions". i designed this poster inspired by one of Melk Imboden's posters and then the titile came to my min itself. It s the 40th part of Yasin Sooreh in the holy Qoran. in this part God says "... the sun never osculates the moon and the night will never  intercurrents the day and all of them are praying in their own firmament".

i used the last bold part as a symbol of a pluralistic view. the Truth is one and unique and all religions are like revolving around it, as a symbol of solar system, as a symbol of Hadj ceremony, as a symbol of everything containng a circle and rotation. it can include all the world not only the religions. and it can also stand for anothe part of Qoran which the great God says " the God is  like light the of earth and heaven". Later i saw this model in so many things in nature as flowers, as rain drops and ...

i love this poster and its content

anyway in January 2007, this poster won the 1st prize in "the first award of Monotheistic Religions" and i still feel pretty happy thinking of that day, but i believe it was all my God's affection. He himself helped me designing this poster and inspired me the title.

you can serach my name in google and find websites about it but thuis is the direct link

the sunshine of my life

well i dont know how many of my posters has been updated yet, but i guess i ve updated most of the ones which were designed before winter 2007. :)

in summer 2006 the Imam Ali museum of religious Arts asked graphic designers to participate in a poster competition called "Monotheistic Religions". in this competition designers were supposed to design their posters on the subject of pluralistic visions on different religions and that most of them, have the same goal and the other subject was "peace". I chose the 1st one and designed 2 posters for the competition one of them was this one:" 

in this poster i ve used iranian old lithographic illustration technique and ornamentals to design a poster with 5 angles (as the sign of 5 Great Prophets: Adam, Ibrahim, Moses, Jesus and Mohammad) they are all holding a book (brought form sky) and so all are talking about the one unique truth.
The txt in the lower part of the poster is a translation of the last 2 parts of “Baqare” sooreh(sooreh is the name of every chapter) in the Holy Qoran; it says “our prophet is faith to what we told him and the prophets before. There s no difference between the God’s prophets. …”

another practice

well i must be really sorry for not coming to my weblog for a long time. My dissertation needs a lot of study and i m teaching Adobe Photoshop & Corel Draw to students at the same time so i m really really busy these days! :)

well, this is another practice in Mr.Abedini's class. the title is "Iranian traditional music" and the form is inspired from an old motif on the Sialk Potters.(ancient Iran) the color is exactly got from the potter and its feeling too for emphasizing on traditional atmosphere of the ceremony. 

Tehran Book fair

and these 2 posters were class practices for "the 18th international book fair". Reza Abedini liked both of these. :)   

Typography poster

when i was a junior in the faculty of fine arts, i had a real nice class with Mr.Reza Abedini. I Do belive that he is a real artist and he was also a good teacher for me. i learned so many things from him. this poster was a part of our university project and its subject is "the first Iranian typography exhibition". i thought alot about the sbj. i wanted to do s.th that others do not. and i decided to use latin alphabet for writing a farsi(persian) txt!!! an English reader can never read this poster but just the one who knows farsi and latin alphabets at the same time! the whole atmosphere is inspires from a webpage and the place of adress and date is exactly the same. :)

Human Rights-2

and the last one which was accepted by Italian Joury was this one. There was a poster echibition held in Torino- Italy and this poster was published in the exhibition catalogue. it was also in their website and i still have the PDF :) something interesting is that i sent them the tiff file but when it was published the layout had changed!! and "HUMAN RIGHTS" had moved from the center of the poster to the right up corner! 

Human Rights- Torino-Italy

In summer 2004 The 5th color was asked to organize a workshop on the subject of Human Rights for iranian design students. I designed 3 posters one of them (right) was affected from Uwe Loesch's Guillotine poster.

the other one was a red one (as the sign of blood) that had the word "HUMAN RIGHTS" in the middle and looked like an equal sign form far.(left)

Molavi

and here's the accepted poster :)

it was the 1st time that my friend and I entered a professional exhibition and the openning ceremony was a dreamy night for us :)

Molana

the 2nd iranian typographic poster sompetition was my next challenge. it was held by the 5th color group. A group of my prefessors in the university that a my friend and i worked as their assistances those days. They published a call for entery as "The 2nd Iranian Typography Exhibition" and the subject was about the famous iranian poet "Molavi".
i sent some posters and the red one was accepted and entered the poster exhibition. i will upload the pictures in my next post.see my name here: http://www.5thcolor.com/events/molavi.htm

Ningbo 2004

well the 1st international competition i attend was the international Ningbo poster biennial in China. Those days i was working in Saed MEshki's studio and the catalogue was sent there. when we saw that there was a student part in the competition he encouraged me to enter. i designed this poster by Freehand and sent it to China. the certificta of exhibit came to my postal adress a few months later :)

that was one of my most satisfactoring memories. :)

 

Ralf Schraivogel

hi again. it was a good day i could spend all my time stydying. i finshed the book " Studying Art History" by Charles R.Jansen to day and it was real practical one.

yesterday i talked about posters of Melk Imboden and today i want to introduce u the posters i designed for "Ralph Schraivogel" anothert Swiss graphic designer.

he was a real nice man too. he came to Tehran with Melk and Maggie Zomstein that winter (Feb 2004). i designed these 2 typographic posters in his own style and his own colors.

Melk Imboden

hi :) i was so busy studyingfor my dissertation that i couldnt come to my weblog but i ve decided to write more from now on :) so let me tell u that my dissertation is about "the visual elements of iranian handicrafts"(for using in posters & brochours). i ve studyed so many articles about crafts in iran and in the other countries of the world, about poster as media and ....

I'm a poster designer that's why i choosed this title. i ve got many poster designs in my resume'. i started designing posters when i was a B.A student in the faculty of fine arts. My first posters was designed for Melk Imboden the swiss graphic designer and phtographer since he had been in Tehran in Feb 2004 and i like his works very much. They deeply affected me and i loved his style. He was very nice and kind himself too.

So Melk Imboden turned into a permanent person in my mind. in wnter 2004, Mr.Reza Abedini was teaching us poster design in Tehran university. he asked us to design posters for our favorite person and i choosedd Melk Imboden! Above are the posters i designed for him. Left is the typographic poster i designed in his style by Kufi script in my own language.

you can see Melk Imboden's posters here:

http://www.posterpage.ch/exhib/ex91_teh/ex91imbo.htm

My 1st post

hi hi hi

it's me :) Elham Mahootchi :)

i ve opened this blog in order to upload my essays in English about Iranian Art and what i ve done in the field of graphic design to let the other friends know about my country & the past & present art in Iran :) and to introduce myself as a graphic designer and graphic art teacher to the ones who dont know me yet!

i will write more about myself in my profile & i will upload my first essay till the end of January :)