Interview with Muiz Anwar (Great Britain)

GRAPHIC EXPERIMENTATIONS WHICH PUSH THE LIMITS OF LEGIBILITY

"My main foray into the Arabic aesthetic was primarily motivated/catalysed by the War on Terror. I had never consciously identified or understood my religious, cultural, ethnic or political identity (like many other young Muslims of my generation), until we were put into the public spotlight following September 11th - where mass hysteria ensued of the Muslim Menace propagated by media stereotypes and misinformation. No one seemed articulate enough to clarify who or what this community I was born into were or represented and consequently we were easily demonised and targeted." (Muiz Anwar)

IAM: You are graphic designer and today the graphic design combines different ways of expression (fine arts, photography, typography, sculpture, conceptual art, etc). What is graphic design according to you?

MUIZ ANWAR: Graphic Design is fundamentally, ‘Visual Communication’ – a canvas upon which we scribe carefully articulated messages through a series of visual linguistics, tailoured into the dialect of the recipient.
As designers, we have a responsibility to ensure that the message we are given charge of delivering, reaches its’ destination in the spirit it was given to us. We often forget our responsibility in this capacity – and get lost in the superfluous aesthetic – following trends instead of nurturing an aesthetic organically relative to the message we are crafting.
Graphic design was very much an ‘invisible’ medium – it was everywhere but nowhere. It was never consciously acknowledged. Today, society is incredibly design literate, they are better equipped to recognise, read and decipher aesthetic indicators aimed at them as an audience – and so we find that graphic design has shifted towards a ‘less is more’ ideology – whereby a message will be distilled into what is often a heavily manicured, aspirational but unattainable reality.
This trend and self-conscious design though beautiful, serves more toward artistic merit than design principle. Artistic messages are given a unique license for abstraction in their message, making them more ambiguous and interpretative. Design however, is there to communicate with clarity – to be pure in its’ conveyance of the idea. ‘Good’ design can be the difference between life and death (health & safety signage). Good design allows people to access information with greater ease and efficiency.

The rest of the article you can read in the magazine.