Stylogenyin the style of Iranian Revolutionary & Sacred Defence Poster

Pictorial & machine age · 1978–1988 · Middle East & North Africa

Iranian Revolutionary & Sacred Defence Poster

Also known as Islamic Revolution posters, Sacred Defence (Defāʿ-e Moqaddas) posters, Iran–Iraq War posters, Tehran martyr murals

Posters, murals and stamps of the 1978–79 Iranian Revolution and the 1980–88 war with Iraq, which fused the red-white-black international revolutionary poster with Persian miniature and coffeehouse narrative painting. Shiʿa martyrdom imagery (red tulips from martyrs' blood, Karbala, white shrouds) and calligraphed slogans, Qur'anic verses and the shahada carry the message, and the same image moves between postage stamp, poster and multi-storey wall.

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A sample layout drawn from the style’s design choices. Stylogeny doesn’t generate images of this style, out of respect for the people it belongs to.

Use it with care

This tradition is built on sacred text and devotional imagery: Qur'anic verses, the shahada, the names of God, the Prophet's family and Imam Husayn, and the Karbala martyrdom narrative at the heart of Shiʿa mourning practice. Never use the calligraphy or martyr imagery as decorative texture, never crop or distort sacred text, and do not imitate Arabic-script lettering without a fluent reader. Martyr portraits show real people, and the posters are also state propaganda of a government still in power, so cite them as historical sources rather than a neutral look, and work with Iranian calligraphers and designers.

01

How it works

  • Combine the revolutionary poster's single red-white-black idea with miniature-style narrative scenes in richer colour.
  • Encode sacrifice through the Karbala lexicon: red tulips, white shrouds, Imam Husayn's standard, a rising red sun.
  • Let calligraphy carry slogans and verses, and shape it into fists, flames or flags when the word must become the image.
  • Use colour symbolically: red for blood and victory, green for Islam, black for mourning.
  • Design each image to scale from postage stamp to poster to building-high mural.

Tehran and other Iranian cities: revolutionary factions in 1978–80, then the cultural and propaganda bodies of the Islamic Republic during the Iran–Iraq War

02

Its design choices

From Stylogeny’s vocabulary of design choices: defining choices make the style, characteristic ones are usual, occasional ones turn up now and then.

Layout & composition
Space & hierarchy
Typography
Colour
Form & shape
Surface & texture
Ornament
Imagery
Medium & production
Tone & intent
Avoids
Ironic & self-aware, Playful & witty, Ornament-free, Pastel, Fluorescent & neon, Gloss & highlights, Found & vernacular imagery

Palette

  • #b31b1b
  • #1e7b45
  • #151515
  • #f2eee4
  • #c9a03c
  • #3a7ca5

Typefaces

  • Nastaʿlīq

    Persian slogans and poetry

  • Thuluth and Naskh

    Qur'anic verses and the shahada

  • Hand-drawn heavy Persian display lettering for slogans

Known for

  • Kazem Chalipa, Iṯār (Altruism), a mural adapted as a poster and a postage stamp

  • Kazem Chalipa, The Guards of the Anemone Fields

    Iran–Iraq War poster

  • Kazem Chalipa, depiction of the Black Friday massacre at Zhaleh Square, Tehran

    8 September 1978

  • Mojahedin-e Khalq May Day poster of a worker breaking his chains

    c. 1979–81

  • Ministry of Islamic Guidance poster showing the United Nations as a foot

  • Peter Chelkowski's poster collection, published in Staging a Revolution

    with Hamid Dabashi, 1999

03

Where it comes from, and what it’s close to

Before it

The style it grew out of, and the styles it borrowed from.

This styleIranian Revolutionary & Sacred Defence Poster1978–1988 · Middle East & North Africa

After it

The styles that grew out of it.

No later style in the atlas grew out of it yet.

Alike in its design choices

Styles that make many of the same choices, related or not, besides those above.

04

Real works

Artefacts in museums, libraries and archives that show the style, linked at their source.

05

Sources

  1. Peter Chelkowski & Hamid Dabashi, Staging a Revolution: The Art of Persuasion in the Islamic Republic of Iran (NYU Press, 1999)
  2. Mehdi Abedi & Michael M. J. Fischer, 'Revolutionary Posters and Cultural Signs', Middle East Report (MERIP), July 1989
  3. Encyclopaedia Iranica, 'Graphic Arts ii. In the 1978–79 Revolution and Iran–Iraq War' (iranicaonline.org)

How Stylogeny researches and checks a style: where the facts come from.