Amir Berbić.

Parts of this project were featured in the academic journal Visual Communication, Vol 16, Issue 1, 2017, SAGE Publishing, London and presented at the 2018 World Design Summit Congress, in Montréal. 

Link

Stadium lights illuminate the ground. A flag flies the red cross from a tall flagpole at the center of camp. A standard issue United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) field tent houses three Bosnian refugee families, and in the corner is a tiny, makeshift design studio. There, my father, Ismet Berbić, designed the visual identity program for our refugee camp. The pyramidal graphic forms in his logo denoted our tapering tent dwellings. Located in Næsbyhoved-Broby, a village on the island Fyn, Denmark; the year was 1993. 

In reference to the plot of sand on which our tents were erected Ismet branded the camp Sahara. The fluctuating nature of sand formations echoed the refugees’ sense of baselessness. The original design included a welcome billboard for the entrance to the camp and posters announcing the arrival of new neighbors to the village. The identity program also included a mock advertisement: on a grass field with pyramids drawn in the background, a happy family walks and kills time.

Design work in an improvised studio signaled hope and opportunity for our family and our fellow refugees. This initially playful gesture further evolved into a collective action for improving conditions in the camp. Sahara became the camp’s official designation in formal documents of the Danish Refugee Council as well as the name of our self-published magazine and soccer club. We organized a school for the children living in Sahara by enlisting parents to teach elementary subjects. A doctor was assigned to teach biology while an economist taught math. My father taught classes in the arts and my mother was a teacher of chemistry.

Over twenty years later, I reconstruct this narrative relying on the few remaining photographs and video recordings from that time. Based on memory, I reinterpret Sahara’s visual identity, posters for the camp’s social and cultural events, the signage made to identify families in each tent, and text-books designed and photocopied for use by our school.

2016–17

Entitled Boundary Lines, the commissioned design installation spans across the windows overlooking Griffin Court, in the atrium of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Modern Wing. The work was developed in conjunction with Design Episodes, a presentation of highlights from the museum’s collection as three provocative vignettes: the modern chair, the emergence of postmodern design, and contemporary identity systems in graphic design. 

The design approach derives from the correlations between typography and the objects featured in Design Episodes. The layered presentation develops an interplay between geometric forms and typography. While the black shapes on the gray wall reference elements from the exhibitions, the words Architecture & Design are indicated in white vinyl stripes on the windows, in a nod to the vertical characteristics of the Renzo Piano’s architectural design for the building. The design rests on the edge of legibility to highlight the graphic characteristics of type.

Curator: Karen Kice

Boundary Lines was recognized among the winners of STA 100, the 2017 Society of Typographic Arts competition and in the 2016 international design exhibition ZGRAF. 

Based in Sarajevo, Pravo Ljudski is a civic organization that promotes independent cinema and related socially engaged art forms. Its activities include the annual film festival focused on human rights topics, youth educational programs, and public campaigns that address broader artistic, social, and political issues. 

As Pravo Ljudski’s lead designer since 2011, I am in charge of the visual identity elements, developing design standards for the production of publications and promotional materials associated with the film festival and related activities.

History Rising was commissioned by the Art Institute of Chicago for the 2010–2011 exhibition Hyperlinks: Architecture and Design, curated by Zöe Ryan and Joseph Rosa. 

This first show in the Architecture and Design Galleries of the museum’s Modern Wing explored the fluid exchanges between architecture and design emerging from developments in production processes, materials research, and influenced by social and environmental concerns (1). Hyperlinks presented projects from an international lineup of participants including Tom Wiscombe, Joost Grootens, Experimental Jetset, Matali Crasset, Studio Makkink & Bey, among others. 

In 2015, the project History Rising was included in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. 

Link

Cities aspire to develop iconic skylines that will carry them into the world of images and memorable postcards. The project History Rising began as a collection of verbal and visual messages recorded from billboards in the city of Dubai. A city of spectacle and immediate consumption, Dubai deployed promotional campaigns with superlative messages that proclaim newness, bigness, and wonder. Slogans such as “History Rising” and “The Earth Has a New Center” attached to images of complex high-rise developments emerging from the then-barren landscape promised an enduring, desirable lifestyle. (2) 

The language and images designed to portray the city’s identity reveal that Dubai sees the value of its constructions not only in their physical environment, but primarily in the emblematic image they project. Emerging from this study is graphic and three-dimensional work that superimposes recorded text with visual interpretations of Dubai’s newly built iconic landscape. 

History Rising relies on iconic flatness as a spatial metaphor—the flatness of postcards and the cut-out slogans refer to the aspired meaning in the representation of architecture rather than the physical presence of buildings, streets, neighborhoods. 

(1)
http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/exhibitions/Hyperlinks/overview

(2)
Zöe Ryan, and Joseph Rosa. Hyperlinks: Architecture and Design. Chicago, IL: Art Institute of Chicago, 2010. 18–19, 48–49, 52–53. 

Visual essay and cover design feature: Design Issues (MIT Press).

A small mosque built for laborers in Dubai at a nearby construction site features minarets outlined with green neon lights, as if aspiring to the glow of Dubai’s skyline. The example hints at some of the contrasts in this photo-essay about a culture changing massively amidst the wealth of oil. The discrepancy between Dubai’s traditional past and the modern future it desires results in an environment with a perplexing identity. Vast desert land is covered by grass fields and invaded by skyscrapers; traditional souks became modern shopping malls; shopping malls become indoor ski resorts, and luxurious hotels look like traditional sailboats. Like a minaret framed by neon lights, Dubai is “history rising”.

International festival of poster design, 2014.
Invited poster contribution.

Designers from thirty-seven countries were commissioned to produce work in response to the centennial commemoration of the assassination of Archduke Franc Ferdinand, 30th anniversary of the Winter Olympic Games in Sarajevo, and in memory of 1992–95 war and siege of Sarajevo. 

EXHIBITION VENUES:

Collegium Artisticum
Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina;

Mexico Poster Biennial
Mexico City, Mexico;

Villa Méditerranée Esplanade
Marseille, France.

This cross-disciplinary design-build studio explored the intersection between typography and three-dimensional form in the process of furniture design and fabrication. It aimed to expand the definition of furniture beyond normative function toward a hybrid condition that allows graphic and semiotic reading.

The work was produced at the American University of Sharjah, College of Architecture, Art and Design, in the UAE. Participants in this special topics course were comprised of students from the Architecture and Visual Communication programs, lead by two instructors with distinct disciplinary expertise (Bill Sarnecky—Architecture; Amir Berbić—Graphic Design).

Studio outcomes were selected for exhibition at the 2012 Salone Internazionale del Mobile, in Milan, among others. 

Core77 Article

Amal’s Prayer Chair / Sarah Alagroobi
This chair rocks to aid in the act of praying. The concept originates from the desire to aid the designer’s late grandmother and mother who struggled to pray in the prostrate position. According to Islamic tradition, those who cannot physically endure prostration may pray in a sitting position. The typographic pattern on the skin of the chair is derived from the Arabic letter kaf and refers to the Quranic verse “The Throne” (Ayatul-Kirsi).

Veto / Rasha Dakkak
The project intersects typography with 3D design by employing Arabic letterforms as a structure for a furniture piece. The table’s form is derived from a crosssectional transformation of the Arabic word la (meaning refusal, denial or disbelief) into kalla (indicating strong disapproval, protest or objection). The concept is inspired by dissent expressed in the Arab world during the Arab Spring revolutions.

Phoenician Reading Table / Noor Jarrah
The reading table is inspired by the Phoenician alphabet, one of the earliest forms of writing. The table surface engraved with Phoenician letterforms provides a base for Latin script emerging from a new, “modern” tablet. The tablet ultimately supports a book in the open
reading position.

The Thinker’s Chair / Maha Habib
The project integrates graphic and 3D form in a semantic design exploration. The chair’s form was constructed by laminating CNC-routed layers of wood and was inspired by Rodin’s masterpiece The Thinker. The arching support compels a person to sit in a similar fashion as The Thinker, whose uncomfortable and tortured pose suggests a difficult intellectual struggle. The weaving pattern of text on the surface responds to grid lines established by the wood laminations, and refers to Dante’s Divine Comedy, Rodin’s original theme for the sculpture.

This class project engages the study of three-dimensional typography through exploration of relief conditions with letterforms. Starting with 2D characters cropped within a square format students manipulate form-counterform / height-depth relationships to achieve three-dimensionality. The collection of individual models forms a 3D alphabet. The project examines how digital fabrication can expand the way graphic designers engage the physical act of making and looks at new typographic forms that emerge in the process.

This work was recognized with a Gold Award by the 2019 Graphis New Talent Annual.

This studio explores three dimensional typography through a series of method-driven formal exercises based on key action verbs: projecting, folding, and layering.

By projecting, students denote dimensional qualities of type through interactions with light, shadow, space, surface, and material. Folding involves manipulation of surface and edge to morph letterforms from two to three-dimensions while addressing structural and material constraints. Layering allows cross-sectional transformation and tectonic conditions in typography. 

The process engages photography as a method of formal analysis. Control of light, shutter, depth of field, and angle of view are employed to emphasize dimensionality and test typographic clarity. Physical models are made to perform as subjects in a photographic image as much as finished designed objects.

In this project, students explore and record the results of projecting, reflecting or in some other way transferring the index of typographic elements onto/into interior and exterior environments. The task is to photographically document those visual expressions that denote dimensional qualities of type through its interactions with light, space, perspective, surface, material, etc.

In this foundations-level project students explore micro-scale formal and spatial relationships by transforming 3.5″ flat paper planes into three-dimensional models through folding, bending, scoring, and cutting.

The project is divided into three successive parts. In Part 1, students work to generate a large collection of individual models. They examine the interactions of edge and surface, format and direction while pursuing tension and confrontation as key principles of consideration. In Part 2, students produce a series of paper models that demonstrate a transformation from one unique state to another through a sequence of nine to twelve steps. The exercise emphasizes systematic control of change by requiring a gradual transition between stages in a progression. Part 3 addresses unit-pattern relationships in three-dimensional design. Students work with a repeated module to develop a super-structure.

Absurd Objects explores the connotative and associative capacity of photographed household items. By modifying, compositing and recontextualizing images the project aims to expand the communicative performance of objects and test their ability to perform as semiotic devices.

Evolving from graduate thesis work the series became part of Dictionary for Saturday and Sunday, a co-authored book with Mile Stojić, a Bosnian writer and poet whose short essays correspond to the poetic nature of the Objects. A symbiosis of Stojić’s writing and Berbic's images gives new life to each component, resulting in a satirical commentary on politics, war, exile, and contemporary society. 

Coauthored with Mile Stojić, 2004.

Images from Amir Berbić’s series Absurd Objects are paired with short essays by Mile Stojić, with attention to typography and text as image. With Absurd Objects, Amir Berbić explored the connotative capacity of household items. By modifying, compositing and re-contextualizing images, he aimed to expand their communicative performance and observe the ability of objects to perform as semiotic devices.

The series of images became part of a coauthored artists’ book with Mile Stojić, a writer from Bosnia whose poetic short essays correspond to the witty nature of Absurd Objects. Together Stojić’s writing and Berbić’s images give new life to each component, resulting in a satirical commentary on politics, war, exile, and contemporary society. 

Dictionary for Saturday and Sunday is included in the Joan Flasch Artists' Book Collection. 

The experience of war in Bosnia and immigrant life in the U.S. were integral to my first work as a designer. In the 1990s and early 2000s, as a high school and college student I designed Zambak, a Chicago-based magazine that supported the integration process of the newly arrived refugees from Bosnia-Herzegovina. This family-run publishing operation featured stories on politics, war, arts and culture, education, immigrant life in America, and promoted strong links between local small-businesses and the community. Zambak’s provocative, satirical and politically engaged covers reflected the pertinent themes of each issue. 

Dani is an award-winning weekly political magazine in Sarajevo, Bosnia. Known for the critical voices of its editorial staff, the magazine has been an important advocate for civil society, reconciliation, democracy, and fight against corruption during the war aftermath in former Yugoslavia. 

After art directing the redesign of Dani in 2003, I served as a consultant with the role of maintaining the magazine's design standards, until 2010.