Atraktor Studio

Vahid Razavi and Atraktor Graphic Studio are proud to announce their participation in this year’s 14th Los Angeles Times Festival of Books taking place Saturday and Sunday, April 25 &26, 2009, at the UCLA Main Campus. They will be presenting a book called The Age of Nepotism, a unique fusion of written word and highly artistic graphic work, crafted to cary the authors universal message to the readers through a new format of media. At the country’s largest and most prestigeous book event, „Nepotism“ will reveal its secrets to the american reading audience. (more…)

Cohabitation of man and nature in the space-village

This piece is one of my favorite illustrations. It has been developed for a long period of time, bit by bit, and it seems like it is never completed. Maybe I will leave it like this, possibly I will do a vector version when I have the time.

Since I was overwhelmed with a lot of design work recently, I had to find a way to let out the steam and ease the pressure on my pulsing brain. The best way I found so far is sketching by hand. Sometimes with a pen, sometimes with a marker, but usually in black and white, or just a couple of colors. This is really a kind of an art therapy – when I get sick of coding, aligning, clean corporate designs, I turn to my dirty sketches. some of them end up being vectorized for further application: t-shirts, posters, small prints etc. and some stay just as they are. I scan them, do a little or no adjusting at all and that’s it.

The piece presented here is one of the most recent vectorized sketches. It is inspired by long lasting obsession with the ‘Space Village Concept’. Robots and other machine-like creatures in the middle of a battle.

Ski Cross kopaonik - Poster

This is the key visual element – a poster for the Ski-Cross that is about to take place on mountain Kopaonik in Serbia this winter. I have also designed the logo for the competition with couple of things in mind: speed, adrenalin rush, grungy style that resembles snow cracks and playful expressions to catch the viewers attention

Ski-cross is a very interesting alpine skiing discipline – four or six skiers race down the bumpy slope full of obstacles, jumps and dangerous curves at the same time. Helmets are obligatory.

I made this CD cover for my band called Duboka Ilegala. The inspiration for this piece was electro – folk music, connection the two terms in a visually appealing yet a bit funny way. You can download some of the songs or even order a full album by clicking this link: Duboka Ilegala Music.

Duboka Ilegala - Cd Cover Front

Cd Cover Duboka Ilegala - Back

Snoflake Freeride Team - T-shirt

One of the things I love most is skiing. So, since I am one of the founders of the team, creating a visual identity for it was kinda natural.

The designs presented here are for T-shirts and a member card for the team. You can order your shirt using the contact page.

I also made the logo applied here.

More ski and snowboard designs still to come! Stay tuned.

Snowflake T-shirt

Snowflake - Member Card

Snowflake Member Card

Yet more beer! This series of poster sketches wasn’t actually meant to be a series. Through a lenghty process of brainstorming, making, rejecting and refining the ideas, These three posters were the ones I think deserve to be presented.

The first one:

Needless to say it was rejected. No comment was made whatsoever.

Second attempt was more ‘serious’:

Closer. But not there yet. So, I made the third one (all of the attached pics are actually low-res sketches, so the quality of the pictures is not too good sometimes):

Bingo! The third one was the lucky winner! I like it because it has that dinamic ‘in your face’ look and feel (I admit I imagined myself swimming in the beer, too), although the first one is still closest to my heart. I think I will make a copy for my room.

(*Then he goes away crying and complaining how clients are so cruel and insensitive. )

And now the first ‘commercial’ post. This is from the time I’ve been working at Publicis Serbia. The task was to brand a popular disco club, connect the beer brand with the music and dancing, thus differentiating it form the competition. So key concepts were: fresh, young, cool and modern.

I liked the idea of making a series of panels – different stuff connected by the same concept and yet not get boring and repetitive. There was also an issue of localizing the brand flavor – in most cases, global Beck’s campaigns had black background with somewhat gloomy look. The client didn’t like black, but I did. I wanted to prove my point – black doesn’t necessarily mean bad. Quite contrary.

Designed for a special cultural occasion – a student group exhibition sponsored by French and German cultural centers in Belgrade. The theme is obvious (hopefully) and yet again I wanted to give it a broader meaning, taking reconsiliation as a starting point and explaining it with as few elements as possible.

This poster is still one of my favorite ones. It is for a gangsta rap band from Belgrade. I tried to get out of the cliche and represent something else than just three guys in baggy trousers and bling-bling jewelery.