finger practice

To keep my fingers from going rusty while being busy mostly with business and other left brain activity, I started on a series of illustrations inspired by poetry. My favourite poem is by Mahmoud Darwish - the Eternity of the cactus.  The lyrical aspect makes for an abundance of visual clues. However well you can illustrate it, words still say more than a thousand lines and colors. 

illustrations featured in arabesque 2

The lifesized illustrations I made at OrientationLab will be featured in Arabesque 2: graphic design from the arab world and persia, by Gestalten. Even though I'm not a designer from those regions, I am greatly inspired by the arabic and persian visual culture, and that shone through enough for the editors to include me in the edition. Edited by Ben Wittner and Sascha Thoma, available from September 2011. 

Go analog

In Holland we are extremely fortunate to have great facilities just around the corner. De Grafische Werkplaats is such a place: a workshop completely dedicated to the graphic arts - lithography, silkscreen for textile and paper, and etching, in the center of The Hague. At the moment I'm working on a series of illustrations with Reza Abedini, and we have a chance to print the work by hand at this wonderful workshop. So support your local workshop and go analog with a day of silkscreening!

This is not iDPure

The 2010 Special edition of Swiss design magazine IDPURE is out now, featuring one of my Nowruz drawings. The theme is "this is not..." You can check out the entire mag online, but you can also buy it (the smell of ink, the touch of paper, mmm...).

Happy new year

To celebrate the persian new year (Nowruz) on the 21st of March, I created two lifesize illustrations with colleague Reza Abedini at OrientationLab.

Kelvin: Color Today

The evenstyle I created at NLXL for Culturenight 2004 has been selected for the publication 'Kelvin Color Today'. See the book on Amazon.com Color is playing an increasingly significant role in global visual communication. It is being used more than ever to give design projects, campaigns and brands their own distinctive style. Surprisingly, however, very little has so far been published that investigates today's evolving perception and application of color.