Yashar Mahmudi

Design without
political awareness
is complicity.

That line is the spine of the practice. It was earned the slow way — I built something I was proud of, then watched someone use it in a way I never intended. Since then, I have not taken a brief without first understanding the hand that holds it.

Creative Director · Brand Strategist · Trilingual EN/FA/KU

Right now

Just finished an eight-month full-time stretch as Creative Director at Holistic Resilience, where most of my recent work shipped under the Raaznet identity. Before that, two years as Creative Director at Zin Studios and a year as Head of Design at the Kurdistan Studies Institute.

Open to project-based brand systems, senior advisory retainers, and the occasional editorial direction gig. The rate sheet is real and not on this page — ask.

What the practice is

01

Brand and identity

For organisations and brands operating in environments where the wrong visual decision is a real risk — not a theoretical one. Civil society, independent media, founders entering contested markets, commercial brands with cultural exposure. Built across Iran, Kurdish contexts, and internationally.

02

Editorial direction

Twelve issues of Poetics as Editor-in-Chief. A podcast. A contributor network. Editorial discipline is the connective tissue under everything else I do.

03

AI as creative infrastructure

Not tools, not shortcuts. The structural question is how creative labor gets organized when the cost of one good output drops to zero. Most of the answer is still being figured out — including by me.

04

Experiments

Things I'm testing without a client. They live at /experiments. The Brain — a navigable map of how the practice operates — is one of them. Border Run, a game about Kurdistan's smuggling routes, is another.

Reach me

Email is the fastest path: contact page has the address and the questions I'd want answered before a first call. For longer-form thinking, /thinking. For the work itself, /work.