Ehsan Yazdani, art director and filmmaker
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I work by reading and by removing,
reading shows what a word or a form already carries. Removing shows how little of it has to be said out loud.
I am an art director and filmmaker based in Berlin. I work in brand identity, film and book design. My subject is inherited meaning, what a language already carries before a design starts. And what happens to it inside systems that standardize, censor or automate. The distance between information and wisdom is the central concern. A dictionary (or these days an LLM) holds everything a word has ever been. It cannot tell you which of those meanings a family will trust with their parents.
Anousheh (2021), a care home in Karaj, began in a dictionary of ancient Iranian concepts and ended in a logotype whose horizontals I thickened by a fraction, because early Farsi letterforms did.
A Perfect Likeness (2026) is the same gap from the other side, made with a system that held far more information than I ever will and still could not aim a joke anywhere but at the victim.
The master's thesis behind that film, AI & Humor (read it here), asked whether a language model can write a black comedy. It cannot, and the limit sits in the architecture rather than in the size of the model. I use these tools most days and treat them the way I treat a first brief, as something that arrives with its assumptions already inside it.
Across identity, film and print, the work asks what disappears when meaning is consumed quickly, and what emerges that nobody put there. Every concept can be made and communicated through words. My practice starts in language, in what a word means and how it is shaped, and ends in the visual form that concept takes.
Every design is a series of decisions, and none of them can be random.
These four questions are the criteria I apply to every brief:
Who is on the other side of this, and what state are they in when they meet it?
What result is being bought, and how will we both know if it arrived?
Stock, ink, print run, server. What does making this actually cost, and how much of that cost is paid by the planet rather than the client?
Who folds, binds, retouches or renders this, and is the saving on the estimate coming out of their wages?
Awards & selections
2D animation
Official Selection, Tehran Film Festival, 2019
Official Selection, Chaniartoon Film Festival, Crete, 2022
2D animation
Official Selection, 100-Second Film Festival
Tehran, 2021
Experience
Graphic Designer → Art Director
Tehran and Berlin (remote), 2015 to 2026
Freelance Graphic Designer & Animator
Kuala Lumpur, 2011 to 2015
Graphic Designer → Animator
Tehran, 2003 to 2011
Film Editor & Director
Tehran, 2005 to 2008
Contact
Open to full-time art director roles in Berlin and to freelance commissions.