The Shahnameh is written in modern Persian, which makes it understandable in spite of its age. I remember as a young boy spending hours at the library reading through its many magical stories, marvelling at its fantastic creatures, and feeling proud of the fact that I could understand its poetry with little help. Reading Shahnameh formed a big part of my childhood identity.

Ever since I started dabbling in illustrations almost two decades ago, I had the goal of illustrating all the characters of Shahnameh. The trouble was, I wasn’t a natural illustrator. So for most of those years, I was paralyzed by the desire to figure out the perfect illustration “style”, before embarking on the project.

I would feverishly follow the work of illustrators who were immensely more talented than I was. I would look at their well-established styles in awe and seek out ideas and inspiration. Every now and then I would try to draw up some of the Shahnameh characters, experimenting with different styles.

And every time, the end result just didn’t feel ‘right’ to me. I would get disappointed and put it aside for months, sometimes years, and the cycle would repeat. Until it didn’t. Eventually life seemed to get in the way, my day job as a UX designer took me farther away from any artistic ambitions I may have had, and I stopped working on the project entirely.

Then my son was born, and I started to realize he LOVED books more than anything else. Soon, looking for beautiful books for him from all over the world became one of my favorite things to do. His library had books from places like Japan, Portugal, Spain, and Korea. (his books have their own Instagram now). Thanks to his mom who is an artist, he had a Persian alphabet book, but absent from his growing international library were books about Shahnameh.

So I decided to pick up my old project again. Rather than trying to establish the perfect ‘style,’ I just started with what felt most comfortable and natural to me; drawing characters by hand, and then creating simple vector art in Illustrator.

It was a slow process; For each character, I read the original poems and looked at archival paintings from old manuscripts in order to capture their true spirit as best as I could. After a few months, I had enough art to create the first volume, and ordered a one-off board book for my son.

The project now has a name, and I’m continuing to illustrate new characters faster than ever as they appear in sequence in the Shahnameh. There’s an incredible cast of female characters in Shahnameh that I’m particularly looking forward to illustrating.

I am excited not just about sharing these characters with my son, but with others who may like them as well. I’ve created an Instagram account where I’m posting my process, all the artworks, and the characters’ stories. One day I hope to publish the book(s) so that Sivan isn’t the only boy in the world who has one, but for now I invite you to follow my journey at instagram.com/ShahsOfLegend.

About the author

Pendar is the Design Lead for Google Translate and lives with his wife, son, and two cats in sunny California. In a previous life he blogged as legofish and achieved notoriety for running a couple of viral cultural campaigns.

Last month, after a long journey, we launched a new version of the Google Translate website with a responsive layout and a modern Material Design UI.

Given the global popularity of Google Translate, we knew we had to prepare for change aversion. There are a lot of great articles written about the topic that provide strategies for minimizing the change aversion response. But as it is often the case with projects of this scale, there are some lessons that can only be learned through hindsight. Here are my top takeaways from redesigning the Google Translate website.

1. Your users are your crystal ball

If you’ve read about change aversion, you’ve likely come across a chart like this:

It shows the different possible outcomes after a change is introduced, but it doesn’t help you predict the outcomes for your change. This lack of clarity and control frustrated me initially. But with each iterative experiment, I realized our users were naturally guiding us through their actions and feedback toward the best possible outcome.

During our experimentation stage, Google Translate website users were submitting feedback submissions ranging from laudative to castigating. It wasn’t always an easy read, but my team and I spent hours reading as many of them as we could and responded by filing bugs or tweaking the design. For example, by reading through the comments we realized we had inadvertently changed the tab order for some elements, causing productivity headaches for our everyday users, so we changed it back. Similarly, we tightened up the information density of the page after we heard loudly that people preferred seeing more information on the screen.

It’s tempting to obsess over having the perfect design before showing it to real users. But it’s better to focus on designing a phased experimentation plan that allows you to collect and respond to user feedback at scale. As long as you have a mechanism for doing that, your users will help you figure it out.

2. Soliciting preference in usability studies can be a trap

Usability testing your new designs can help you catch its biggest issues and give you a broad assessment for your design direction. Typically these studies are done with low sample sizes– a dozen participants or fewer. While it’s tempting to ask usability study participants which design they prefer, the results are not statistically reliable and can mislead you into a false sense of security.

We did several rounds of qualitative user research studies for Google Translate’s new website, discovering and correcting usability issues early on. We also solicited participants’ design preferences, who overwhelmingly preferred the new version. But we were mindful not to draw strong conclusions from the preference data, and it was just as well — the actual spread of user preference after our initial roll out did not quite match what we had seen earlier in user testing.

3. Let A/B testing be your arbiter

With the new design, we wanted to bring more vibrance to Google Translate’s website. In our early iterations we used colorful illustrative icons (created by the talented Alexander Mostov), but early experiments with those assets in our mobile apps didn’t show good results. So we dropped them in favor of simpler Material icons.

Another way we introduced some personality was by making translations appear in white text over a blue background, just like how we always displayed them in our mobile apps. To make longer translations easy to read, we adaptively changed the text and background colors to black over gray after a user’s query reached a certain length.

But some of our teammates were still not convinced with the blue color. A/B testing came to the rescue. We ran two side by side experiments — one using the adaptive approach described above and the other always showing translations in dark text on a gray background. The results were convincing, users in the blue background experiment were translating less often, probably because they didn’t like it. I was sad to say goodbye to the blue, but we found other ways to brighten up the website, for example by using illustrations on promo cards and empty states.

Redesign projects can be hard. Not knowing how people will react can be scary. What I learned through redesigning Google Translate’s website was that instead of trying to prevent or control the people’s aversion to change, it’s more productive to embrace it as an important part of the design process. By designing a carefully planned rollout strategy that allows your users to submit feedback you can get valuable data at scale from those who matter most — helping you make better design decisions.

With contributions from Olivia Grace.

Transforming Google Translate was originally published in Google Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Tirgan has always been a highly collaborative effort, bringing together hundreds of passionate volunteers. This year, I wanted to use the festival’s poster as a platform for collaboration.

Rose and the nightingale

Gol o Bolbol, or the rose and the nightingale, is a painting genre that is an authentically Persian interpretation of diverse cultural influences spanning over 400 years from pre-Safavid Iran to late Qajar period. Originally inspired by Chinese paintings and later influenced by European aesthetics, the bird & flower motifs resonated with Iranians due to the symbolic significance of birds and flowers in Persian literature and poetry.

I was inspired by Gol o Bolbol, which is a perfect realisation of the potential that exists in the dialog between people and cultures. My goal was to create a series of modern Gol o Bolbol compositions through collaboration between artists of different backgrounds.

The pitch

Armed with just a rough concept I called my talented friend, collaborator, and friend of Tirgan Sam Javanrouh. I told him I wanted to create a modern interpretation of the Gol o Bolbol using real-life photography and asked if he would be interested in shooting it. Magnanimous as he is, he agreed.

I really believed in this direction, but I still had to convince the Tirgan executives. As in previous years, I prepared a pitch deck. But unlike before, rather than providing multiple options I only presented a single concept.

It was a risky move, but fortunately the Tirgan team was on board. The next step was to complete the creative team by finding a florist. Thanks to Tirgan’s connections we partnered with Hossein Mendozza, a talented local Toronto artist. With his famous project management acumen, Tirgan’s own Nima Ahmadi scheduled the first shoot date and provided a studio space for Sam and Hossein. On the day, I was on hand remotely — from my home in California — to provide feedback and answer questions. The team did an incredible job shooting multiple beautiful arrangements, sending me updates in real-time. There was one that stood out, and I knew immediately we had our hero poster.

And there you have it. More posters will be added as we get closer to the festival, but for now I wanted to share our direction with you. A big thanks to everyone involved, and thank you for reading.

Tirgan 2019 was originally published in Redesigning Iran on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

2008: The beginnings

The first festival was held in 2008 by a small group of volunteer organizers, under a different name: “Once upon a time.” I was asked to create the festival’s logo and visual identity and help produce all the festival assets. I wanted the festival’s brand to capture the fun, vibrant, and lively atmosphere that the event promised. For the logo, I used the elegant curves of Persian calligraphy to create a butterfly out of the festival’s name. The inaugural poster was an explosion of colors, shapes, and motifs that helped people anticipate the type of activities on offer at the festival. Arabesque flourishes hinted at the festival’s Persian roots.

2011: Tirgan gets its name

In 2011 the festival was permanently renamed to Tirgan. Tirgan’s roots date back thousands of years to an ancient celebration, and we wanted a new identity to reflect and celebrate the enduring nature of the occasion. Because people were already familiar with the previous festival’s branding, I wanted the new logo to feel like a logical evolution of the old one and contain the same essential elements; uplifting colours and Persian typography. It was ultimately the tree motif that emerged as our final brand.

For the branding, our plan was to use the logo as a consistent anchor, wile designing a new poster for each edition of the festival. For the 2011 edition, I created a visual language inspired by Persian tapestry. With our event line-up changing frequently, this design allowed us to scale and adapt quickly.

2013: Bigger and better

By 2013 Tirgan was already in its third edition and was attracting crowds of well over 100,000. My theme for the 2013 edition of the festival was ‘colliding worlds,’ an affirmation of the dichotomy between the festivals’ western physical setting and its eastern cultural content. With the festival itself growing, we had many more assets to produce; posters, event booths, print ads, festival programs, sponsorship guides, merchandising, signage. In addition to overseeing the production of all these assets, I also designed the UX and user interface for our iPhone app. We made gratuitous use of Sam Javanrouh’s brilliant photos of Toronto, who graciously allowed us to use them.

2015: Tirgan turns 5

2015 was a special year because it was our 5th edition of the festival. By now Tirgan now had its own office and permanent staff, in addition to our passionate and ever-growing volunteers. It was also the first time I was working with the team remotely after having moved to San Francisco.

I was itching for a more illustrative style this time, and after exploring several directions I ended up with the ‘halves’ concept, showing cross-sections of elements that have similar significance in both Iranian and Canadian cultures.

In addition to creative direction for the festival, I also updated the design of our app to be compatible with the newer iOS version as well as our updated festival theme.

2017: a day at the fair

After the 2015 festival, and after so many years in charge of the festival’s design, I wanted to hand the torch to someone else with fresh ideas. But old flames die hard, and over a cup of coffee in the summer of 2016, the festival organizers convinced me to keep the fire burning for another year.

Thankfully, the festival’s 2017 artistic statement provided just the spark I needed. It drew parallels between multiculturalism in ancient Iran and modern day Canada. This gave me an idea for visually representing this concept in a way that built on the success of the 2015 creatives for which the festival received a good deal of positive feedback.

To realize the idea, I decided to work with the talented Alex Mostov, Seattle-based illustrator whose style I love.

In the foreground, the stone reliefs of Persepolis, ancient Iranian palace, bridge the past and the present and — I hope — spark a moment of reflection and contemplation; the ruins might be thousands of years old, and people’s sense of fashion might have evolved somewhat, but the spirit and drive that motivated them to celebrate and enjoy life is still as new as ever.

Tirgan gets a little sister

Also in 2017, Tirgan started hosting the Nowruz Festival, a smaller festival that coincides with the Persian new year. For this, I wanted to create visuals that made it obvious it was a ‘Tirgan’ event, while making sure people don’t confuse the two festivals. So I stuck with the same hand-drawn feel and illustrative style, but changed the primary color to green and dropped the Persepolis illustration in favour of a 7-seen spread; the traditional table that is set out for the Persian new year.

2019: more collaborations

For the past few months I’ve been working on the 2019 creatives. This time, the work is based on collaboration between even more creatives. The new poster will be revealed at the Tirgan Yalda fundraising Gala in a few days. I can’t wait to share it with you all here after that :)

Designing a festival was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Origins

According to the airline’s (horrendous-looking) website, the original logo was selected in 1961 as the winning entry from the airline’s public design competition. 22-year-old Edward Zohrabian was the designer.

The inspiration for the logo comes from Homa, the Persian mythological griffin that appears on top of the columns of Persepolis (you may remember the same creature from the piece on Persepolis). The use of Homa is truly an inspired move; not only is it a fantastical flying creature of historic significance, but the word Homa is also in Persian the acronym for “National Iranian Airline.” I clearly remember how impressed I was about this the first time I learned about it as a child.

New logo

The Iran Air logo frequently makes best-of lists for airline brands. I was always going to handle it with care. To simplify the logo while maintaining and celebrating the essence of it I used the squint test to determine the absolute essential elements of Homa:

I used this to reconstruct the Homa form in the simplest way I could, making frequent use of perfect ovals and golden ratio curves where I could:

I was pretty happy with that last one. I’m particularly fond of the wing’s three parts (yes, I’m a sucker for Adidas). The three stripes can be used as a secondary branding element. For the type as well, I didn’t want to steer too far away from the original Helvetica. So I went with the slightly more breathy classic Avenir. Here it is, with some applications. I hope you like it.

Thanks for coming this far. If you liked it, the t-shirts are available at my online store Iranian Apparel (and they’re on sale for a few more days).

About the author

Pendar is a former amateur blogger, ex- dabbler in web comics, serial clothing line creator, and featherweight influencing champion who gave up the glamours of the expat blogging social scene for a career in interaction design. He now lives with his wife and two cats in sunny California. Outside of corporate slavery he illustrates legendary kings and runs IranianApparel.com.

Iran Air was originally published in Redesigning Iran on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Rule 1: find a niche audience (preferably cut off from the world financial system)

In 2006 I lived in Toronto and I was getting ready to finish grad school. 2006 was also a World Cup year, and Iran –the country I was born in– had made it to the finals for only the second time during my lifetime. I wanted to buy Iran-themed soccer fan shirts, but nobody was selling them. So I jumped on the opportunity to procrastinate –as I often did in grad school– and decided to design and sell my own. And thus began my journey of serial internet t-shirt-preneurship

My target audience were fans of Iranian soccer. Not the tens of millions who lived in Iran — they had no access to credit cards or international online payment platforms thanks to sanctions— but the few hundred thousand soccer fans of Iranian descent in diaspora. Thanks to this narrow pool of potential customers, I never had to worry about things like profit.

Rule 2: don’t protect your designs

There are digital image manipulation techniques you can use when sharing your designs or uploading them online to make it harder for copy cats to steal them. I didn’t use any of them. In fact I liberally uploaded pristine trace-ready images every where to promote my store. One of my early designs –a tribal lion with calligraphic words– became a frequent source of plagiarism. Over the years I’ve seen my lion design tattooed on C-list Iranian celebrities, printed on rival t-shirt sellers’ merchandize, and used as a brand by a “luxury” watch store in NYC.

Rule 3: Keep lots of inventory

After selling a few hundred shirts through an online print-on-demand service, I was ready to take the next step: create a brand, order inventory, and do all fulfillment myself. So I partnered with an old friend to create Xerxes Alliance. I thought I had a brilliant concept: I was going to write a story based on Persian legends and myths, and there would be a shirt for each ‘chapter.’ If you bought the shirt, you got the chapter, and vice versa. I even made a fancy ‘page-turning’ website (warning, it’s flash).

The idea was appealing enough to get us on a local TV segment in Toronto. But apparently not everyone was into Persian mythology. The good news was that my partner and I didn’t have to buy birthday gifts for several years.

Rule 4: build it and they will come

In 2014, just ahead of another World Cup I partnered with a different friend and fellow creative to launch a new brand: Iranian Apparel. Having learned my lesson from the Xerxes saga I went back to the print-on-demand model. Again our audience were Iranian soccer fans. Online shopping was much more of a thing in 2014 than it was in 2006, so we were ready for the floodgates to open. There was no flood.

Rule 5: keep doing it

While my friends and x-partners were smart enough to recognize the terrible return on investment and decided to spend their time more wisely, I’m back at it again for the 2018 World Cup. Whether it is the pleasure of seeing a random person wearing one of my t-shirts, the illusion of doing something creative, or simply naive optimism, I’m continuing to build the internet’s smallest t-shirt empire. You can do it too.

Making complex data easier to understand

The Google Display Network is a set of websites across the web that advertisers can show their ads on. With more than half a dozen different targeting methods to choose from, and large amounts of data displayed across 7 different tabs, some Display Network advertisers found it hard to understand their campaigns’ performance. To separate important insights from noise, they needed to have the expertise to sort, filter, and slice all that tabular data in the right ways. Here’s what the old UI looked like:

We started by showing advertisers early wireframes of summarizations we thought they would find useful. We wanted to answer questions like: do advertisers care more about where their ads are showing, or the types of people the ads are reaching? Do they want to know what display ad sizes they’re missing, or do they want to see what devices their audience use?

After talking to some advertisers and hearing their feedback, we realized they had even simpler questions, like: Which of my targeting dimensions are getting the most clicks, and what age group is responding best to my ads? So we narrowed the field and focused on creating visual summarizations of existing performance data associated with advertisers’ targeting dimensions.

For the UI, we decided to use cards since they provided the flexibility needed for a dashboard. But cards were never used in AdWords before, and with so many UXers working on different AdWords features, we were always mindful of not doing things that would break consistency. So as with any new UI pattern, we documented general UI guidelines in our centralized spec site. These “living” specs were updated.

It took multiple rounds of user testing and many iterations for the Display summary project to evolve. Along the way I worked with the data visualization engineering team, defining new features for them to implement, such as the ability to show pie chart labels using whiskers. The final result was a simple, single-page summary that showed only the most important insights and allowed advertisers to dive deeper into the other tabs if required. This UI also provided inspiration for the later Material redesign of AdWords.

Making campaign creation easier

Creating a new ad campaign in AdWords used to involve filling out a long, complex form full of technical terms. In order to configure a successful campaign, advertisers had to know how to map their business goals into our features and terminology. This wasn’t easy for everyone. For example, this was the form for only the first step of the campaign creation process:

I was asked to turn this into a more human experience, and we decided to put users’ goals front and center — literally. The idea was to start by asking advertisers what their goals were, and then highlight only the relevant features.

Our two main challenges were: 1) defining a common set of goals that accurately portrayed advertiser needs and 2) creating the best possible user experience for goal selection. This was a big effort that involved a multitude of stakeholders across product areas within and beyond AdWords, who all had to agree on a commonly defined taxonomy and overall user experience.

While my PM counterpart focused on the first challenge, I started exploring many different UIs for goal selection and rapidly testing and iterating on them. Here are some of the early explorations:

We found out through user testing that advertisers preferred to see all the available goals at once. But presenting all the options without making the UI feel overwhelming was a challenge. We also had technical challenges to deal with. For example, within our four categories of goals, advertisers were only allowed to select goals from a single category. Furthermore, there were some options that were mutually-exclusive, even within the same category. Using subtle animations and other UI hints, we were able to convey which options were selectable at once.

Today, at the start of campaign creation, we ask advertisers to tell us about their goals in simple terms that everyone understands. Based on their selection, we tailor the rest of the process to highlight only the features and options that are most relevant.

Contributing to the Material Design specs

Campaign creation is a multi-step process, and we needed to indicate progress to users. To do this, we researched and designed our own stepper component. And since Google’s open culture encourages everyone to share designs and contribute to Material specs, we added it as a component to the Material Design library, helping other designers in and out of Google.

Making ads more beautiful (and effective)

Advertisers who advertise on the Display Network typically use visual banner ads. While big advertisers have the means to design and develop custom creatives, smaller advertisers sometimes use display ad templates provided by AdWords. The problem was that these templates were old and looked dated.

I really wanted to improve them, even though nobody had asked me to. This is one of the things I love the most about Google. If you see something that can be improved, you can make it better and you’re encouraged to lead.

I identified the team who had created the templates and reached out to them to tell them I was interested in improving them. They were glad to hear it. I updated 12 of the old templates and created several new ones.

In addition to the templates, the ad formats team were also working on a project that involved automatically converting text ads into rich, display ads. This was done by finding the advertisers’ logo, extracting relevant images from the advertisers’ other display ads, and then combining them with the messaging from their text ad. It was an amazing piece of technology.

There was a lot of engineering magic going on behind the scenes to extract these logos and images, but stitching them all together programmatically in a way that resulted in a beautiful creative was a challenge.

I volunteered to help. First, I specified in detail a framework for selecting the right colors, based on the existing colors of the logo in a way that would preserve the advertisers’ brand. Then, I created an extensive layout library based on the extracted image sizes and aspect ratios.

This helped developers know exactly how to lay out the creative in every possible situation and for all the major ad sizes. You can read more about richer text ads on the AdSense blog. With the performance of these new ads, this project also proved that good design can positively impact the performance of the ads and help advertisers get better results.

Helping advertisers learn about their audience

Most advertisers think they know their audience pretty well. A ski shop for example would naturally want to show their ads to skiers. But what if the people who visit their store also happen to travel more frequently than the general population? Knowing this information can help the advertiser reach more potential customers.

That’s what we did with Audience Insights—a tool that showed advertisers general information about their audience that they might have otherwise never guessed. The biggest UI challenge was distilling complex topics such as audience indices, which measure how one population compares to the general population. To make things easier to understand, I decided to use natural language and visualizations wherever possible. The result was a highly interactive tool that allowed advertisers to learn about their audience from different dimensions:

Reflection

Let’s be honest; if you’re a UXer looking from the outside, working on ad products may not seem that sexy. Yet once you start working in ads you realize your incredible power to have impact as a designer. There are few areas that are as rich, complex, and multi-disciplinary as ads, and where there’s complexity, there’s opportunity for design to shine. I was fortunate to work with so many brilliant and interesting people during my time in AdWords. If you ever get a chance to work in ads, take it!

Designing AdWords was originally published in Google Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Humans have been fascinated with magical creatures or devices that break language barriers for as long as languages have existed. At Google Translate, we have the opportunity to work on a product that helps us get one step closer to realizing the magic.

Discovering the magic

Google Translate’s instant camera translation and real-time conversation modes never cease to amaze our users. But beyond their wow-inducing nature, they are extremely useful as well, helping language learners, students, tourists, and all sorts of people who need to break through language barriers.

The problem

Unfortunately, many of our users did not know these features existed. We first got a hunch this is true when we noticed people asking for features we already had during user research interviews. We confirmed that by running a survey which showed 38% of our users did not know we had these tools.

First attempts

Our hypothesis was that the entry points into these tools were too small and hidden. Our first instinct was to make them bigger and more noticeable. So we experimented with new UIs that did just that.

To our surprise, this had the opposite effect! Usage of camera and conversation actually went down. So what was going on? When we dug in, we found that many people simply ignored colorful things below the main box, often assuming they were unimportant, especially as we had historically used that space to show feature promotion cards.

Back to the drawing board

So we went back to the drawing board and asked ourselves; what are the minimum changes we can make to the existing familiar UI to make those features more clearly visible? We tweaked the icons, added text labels, and split the voice feature into its two important but separate use cases: dictation and conversation.

This worked! Usage of all features increased across the board, with the handwriting being used as much as 25% more than it was before! We even started seeing tweets from people who thought these were new features, even though they had existed for years.

Improving the conversation UI

We didn’t stop there. At Google Translate we’re always thinking about how we can improve the product experience for our users. We wanted to make the conversation mode UI easier and more intuitive to use.

Our old conversation mode UI had 3 buttons: two buttons in the left and right for each language, and a big mic icon in the middle which we sometimes referred to as the magic mic. The magic mic was supposed to know when people were talking, what language they were speaking in, when they stopped talking, and when to translate, all without any additional input from users.

It was magical when it worked. But for some languages, the magic mic wasn’t quite as accurate as it was for others. And because the UI emphasized the magic mic, many people were only using that, not even realizing there are two other manual language buttons giving them better control and accuracy. As a result, some users were encountering errors and abandoning this mode for other options like typing.

Ch-Ch-Changes

Following the lessons we learned from improving discoverability by making simple changes, we asked ourselves: what are the simplest changes we can make to the UI to make the experience more intuitive?

We made the manual language buttons much more visible by changing their shape and color. We still kept the magic mic of course, and even gave it a more descriptive text label. But it was no longer the big star of the UI.

At the same time, we worked with the hardware team to make sure the experience worked with the Pixel Buds as well. We made small tweaks to the UI such as showing a headset icon when the Pixel Buds were connected. One of our brilliant designers, Liu Liu, even came up with the ingenious idea of the 'ice breaker' screen. He had noticed in user studies that the most awkward part of the interaction was the beginning of the conversation. He made a visual screen with a standard message that the user could just show to the other person to break the ice.

As a result of the UI changes as well as other technical improvements that made the conversation mode faster, we saw a noticeable increase in the usage of speech translations overall. While our quest for improving these and other features doesn’t end here, this was a great first step in making our most magical features more discoverable and easier to use.

Designing the UI of Google Translate was originally published in Google Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Initially founded as a cycling club in 1945 by an army general, the club was originally called The Cyclists. It soon changed its name to Taj. While the Persian word Taj literally translates to crown in English, the word is also used as a term of endearment and respect.

Despite this, the symbolic association of the crown with the Iranian monarchy meant that the club was forced to change its name after the 1979 revolution. Esteghlal — independence in English — was chosen as the new name. However, to this day many fans still use the Taj in their chants.

Logo

The club’s founding logo was a man on a bicycle, fitting for a cycling club. After the first name change to Taj, the club sported a new logo with 4 interconnected rings (presumably symbolizing their history as a cycling club) and a crown in the middle.

The next name change Esteghlal (independence) had its roots in popular revolutionary slogans, and with it came a new logo that broke with continuity and introduced new elements. This logo was used throughout the 80s, a decade that saw Iran fight a bloody war with Iraq.

After the war, it was time for a new look. A cleaner, more elegant brand was born; The interlocking circles showed a sensible regard for the club’s history, and the clean lines and modern look symbolized a hope for the future. What’s a little unclear is the significance of the number 3, and the colored third circle that extends into a curved shape. Perhaps is is an homage to the Persian paisley.

The new logo

It is not uncommon for soccer fans to feel superior to their rivals, but for fans of Esteghlal, this is a defining characteristic that is likely the legacy of their former club name. Whatever the origins, a strong sense of elitism percolates through the psyche of club supporters to this day, evident in popular taunts like longi (roughly translates to wastecloth) used for opposing Persepolis fans. I wanted to capture this legacy, albeit in a less hooligan-ish, more elegant way, but it was also important to maintain elements of graphic continuity. Here is the process and final outcomes:

What if…

One day the club musters the courage to heed the call of its fans and change its name back to Taj, it will undoubtedly open itself to a new world of branding possibilities. Not only is the name very international (thanks to Taj Mahal), its short length and elegant letterforms in both English and Persian make it ideal for a typographic mark. I couldn’t resist doing some explorations.

About the author

Pendar is a former amateur blogger, ex-dabbler in web comics, serial clothing line creator, and featherweight influencing champion who gave up the glamours of the expat blogging social scene for a career in interaction design. He now lives with his wife and two cats in sunny California. Outside of corporate slavery he watches Netflix and runs IranianApparel.com.

Esteghlal (Taj) was originally published in Redesigning Iran on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Despite this, Team Melli –the national team which the Federation is responsible for organizing– has achieved moderate success in recent years. This has largely been thanks to the leadership of coach Carlos Queiroz who has instilled a great team spirit since taking the helm in 2011.

But he is also perpetually frustrated by the federation’s lack of planning, and has threatened to resign several times. His main ask, which he often repeats on social media, is an appeal for unity within the Federation’s governing bodies.

Interestingly, Team Melli itself is an extremely powerful uniting force. For the Iranian fans, no matter their ideology or political leaning, the love of Team Melli is universal.

Unity as brand value

Focusing on unity as the brand value for IFF seemed like the most authentic approach. While for the Federation unity can only be described as an aspirational value, for the fans, it is truly realized. And therein lies the Federations’ gift. But first, a little bit of brand history.

The origins

The Iran Football Federation was founded in 1920. Its pre-revolution emblem was quite graphic. It was made of three elements: the overall form inside the frame is a ف, or a Persian letter “F” rendered in a curved paisley form, which is a traditional Iranian motif. The letter’s dot is split into a Football and a latin “F.” The crest shape — the union of a square and a circle — feels modern and universal.

The post-revolution logo is much less stylized. It keeps the semi-round frame — which I appreciate — but gone are the graphic elements and instead we have straightforward renderings of a flag and a football, along with bilingual titles.

Design

Unity as a graphic theme for an Iranian audience presents a particular challenge; Iran is a society where almost everything from the name of the country, to the symbols on the flag, to pre and post-Islamic artistic styles can be a topic for divisive arguments. My requirements for this project were:

• Incorporate flag colors
• Make it clear it’s about football
• Inspire pride and unity and avoid religious/political references

When it comes to symbols of national unity, Iran’s geographic map is as non-controversial as it gets. The map of Iran also has its distinct ‘cat ears,’ which can be used as a graphic element. While trying to simplify the map’s shape, I discovered that it can be recognizably constructed out of a simple hexagon grid if I modified only one of the hexagons. This was great because hexagon grids are also reminiscent of soccer ball patterns. However, I struggled to make this work, as you can see in my early explorations.

I was about to give up and move on to a new concept. As a desperate last try, I introduced the crest shape of the current federation logo, and that seemed to make it work a lot better. The rest fell into place after that.

Outcomes

Thanks for reading. If you like this series you can follow the Redesigning Iran publication here on Medium, or follow me on Twitter.

About the author

Pendar is a former amateur blogger, ex-dabbler in web comics, serial clothing line creator, and featherweight influencing champion who gave up the glamours of the expat blogging social scene for a career in interaction design. He now lives with his wife and two cats in sunny California. Outside of corporate slavery he watches Netflix and runs IranianApparel.com.

Iran Football Federation was originally published in Redesigning Iran on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.