VAHÉ ABED

Raised as an ethnic minority in Tehran, I earned a bachelor's and master's degree in Graphic Design, and I spent a decade running a successful studio. During this time, I designed meaningful posters that addressed women's rights, child labor, renewable energy, animal protections and humanitarian causes like poverty and the refugee crisis, and judges selected my works out of thousands of entries for inclusion in design competitions around the world. I also had the opportunity to direct music videos, write stories, design tattoos, start a silk-screen apparel company, and learn techniques like engraving, color correction and commercial offset printing. Most recently, I have been studying motion graphics, and incorporating them into my work has been immensely gratifying.

When I think about graphic design, I first think about the tools that help an image or a motion picture communicate with the audience. Spanning my career to date, this included using both analog and digital tools as a product photographer and visualizing shots first through a series of sketches. It also involved developing stylistic tools, with simplicity, minimalism, white space and contrast becoming staple characteristics of my work. I embrace the importance of original photography in the posters and graphics I design, and I continue to seek new and better ways to convey the most amount of meaning through the simplest image possible.

In 2016, I moved to Los Angeles and became the creative lead at a media company...