Hamzeh Naghdi is an Iranian-Australian calligrapher and type designer.
Hamzeh Naghdi began the formal study of Persian calligraphy at the age of ten, working through the classical training in which individual letters are practised before words, and words before lines. In 2004 he received the Momtaz qualification in Persian calligraphy from the Iranian Calligraphists Association. He then continued his study of Persian Naskh under Abdolsamad Samadi.
In his thirties he began writing the complete Qur’an by hand in Persian Naskh. The work was planned as one book rather than as a set of separate calligraphic pieces, so that letterforms, spacing and page structure remained consistent from the first page to the last. The project took nearly a decade. The completed manuscript was formally presented in Iran in 2011, and pages from it are held in the collection of the International Museum of the Holy Qur’an in Tehran.
He later moved from the handwritten letter to the digital one and began designing Persian typefaces, carrying the proportions and relationships of the calligraphic letter into type.
He is an Iranian-Australian graphic designer.
He began working professionally with books in his twenties, at Hejrat Publishing, where he designed and laid out books. He later became head of art and graphic design at the Centre for Translation of the Holy Qur’an. Over about a decade he designed more than one hundred books, magazines and catalogues, working across book design, typography, page composition and visual identity.
His practice treated a book as a single object: cover, typography and interior pages were designed together, with each decision made in relation to the text. In 2000 he received an award for his design of Hadith-e Zendegi magazine at a magazine festival in Isfahan.
By his thirties his work had moved from designing around words to shaping the letterforms themselves, and calligraphy became the principal focus of his work.
He designs his own publications: the print and digital editions of his novels, their covers and interior pages, as well as his logo, visual identity and website.
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