About
Yashar Mahmudi.
The basics first.
The line that organises everything
Design without political awareness is complicity.
It is not a slogan. I built something I was proud of, then watched someone use it in a way I never intended. The design survived. The intent was inverted. Since then, I have not taken a brief without first understanding the hand that holds it.
That single sentence is the spine of how I decide what to take on, who I work with, and what I refuse. Most of the practice is downstream of it.
"I am not a creative director who learned about politics. I am not an activist who picked up design."
What I do
I work as a Creative Director and Brand Strategist for a wide range of clients — civil society organisations, independent media, founders, commercial brands, governance-adjacent institutions. What ties them together isn't the sector. It's that the work tends to land in places where the visual decisions carry consequence beyond the page.
Most of what I do is identity systems, editorial direction, and the occasional creative-systems redesign — the structural work that figures out how a small team produces brand-accurate output without burning out.
When the work goes well, the visible output is a brand. The invisible output is institutional credibility — the ability of the client to be taken seriously by audiences that have every reason to be skeptical.
The combination, plainly
What's actually rare
about this CV.
Digital power · platform governance
The analytical frame underneath the work — how platforms encode behavior, how attention gets engineered, how infrastructure shapes what populations can communicate. Theory is not a footnote here. It's the operating framework under the design decisions.
Five years building
Two years at Zin Studios as Creative Director. Eight months full-time at Holistic Resilience leading the Raaznet identity and editorial system end-to-end. A year as Head of Design at the Kurdistan Studies Institute. Twelve issues of Poetics as Editor-in-Chief.
Iran, Kurdistan, MENA
Most of the work has been built in or for Persian and Kurdish contexts. The political and cultural assumptions baked into global design frameworks tend to misfire here. That mismatch is most of what I get hired to navigate.
Trilingual, professionally
English, Persian, Sorani Kurdish — direct access to three distinct professional and cultural communities, not via translation. Live interpretation experience at international institutional conferences.
Who I work with
Not everyone.
Founders building in politically complex markets. Commercial brands with cultural exposure that other studios miss. Independent media, civil society, governance-adjacent institutions. Tech organisations serving sensitive contexts. Editors and senior strategists who want a sharper second judgment on a hard decision.
I will not work for organisations that use design — intentionally or structurally — to suppress, surveil, or control people. Standing policy. In 2025 I declined 31 engagements, most of them on those grounds.
If your content feels slightly too heavy for the average social media reader, you are probably in the right place.