Raaznet

What I loved

A brand voice with one rule: it never gets a reader questioned.

The work

Persian-first counter-surveillance publication for readers under censorship in Iran and the diaspora. Eight months as Creative Director at Holistic Resilience, working under real political and cultural pressure.

One rule ran the whole brand: it never gets a reader questioned. The voice is a controlled lexicon — coded phrasing that reaches insiders and slips past automated censors.

Five hues, two type families, twenty-one icons — scaled across Persian, English, Arabic, and Kurdish.

Under the brand sits the work it carries: five long-form reports, 194 pages, on who builds Iran's surveillance apparatus, who buys it, and who writes the law that permits it. The photographs are real, pulled into the brand's blue and red halftone. Published as PDFs and a Tor onion archive, so it reaches readers the open web cannot.

Then it ships. raaznet.com runs seven sections, dark by default for readers on a phone after dark, with a secure disclosure tool and the reports living inside it. On social the same system splits into four reel series: Sianat for privacy alerts, Khiaban for the street, Bazjoo for interrogation accounts, Megafon for announcements. In Q1 2026 alone those reels drew 9.2M video views at 28.88% engagement, predominantly inside Iran.

I have built a fair number of brands. This is the one that stuck. Somewhere in Iran, a person opened one of these on a phone they were a little afraid to be holding, and it did the quiet thing it was meant to do. That part never makes it into a case study. What is above is the version with nice kerning. If any of it landed, or you want to make something together, or you think the blue is wrong, I would genuinely like to hear from you.