Basteha
An exhibition platform carrying thousands of high-resolution images, where the whole constraint was serving them fast.
Project Info
Methodology
Summary
Basteha is the reference archive for packaging design in Iran and the organiser of its international packaging exhibition. I designed and built the front-end: a Persian, right-to-left gallery holding thousands of high-resolution photographs.
The Challenge
The site's entire value is the work it holds, judged by an audience of designers who notice a compressed image immediately. It had to carry that image weight and stay fast.
The goal: an archive that manufacturers can filter by category, where every piece credits the designer who made it.
The constraint
Basteha is the reference archive for packaging design in Iran, and its whole value is the work it holds: thousands of high-resolution photographs of physical packaging, judged by an audience of designers who will notice a compressed image immediately. The site had to carry that image weight and stay fast, in Persian, right to left.
I designed it and built the front-end.
What I decided
The interface gets out of the way.A grid with no decoration of its own, because anything I add competes with the photograph next to it. On a gallery, restraint is a functional decision rather than a stylistic one.
Browsing is filtered, not scrolled.The archive is used by manufacturers looking for a specific category, so I built a taxonomy across food, cosmetics and industrial packaging, with filters that narrow the grid rather than loading a new page.
Every project credits its designer.Each piece links to a profile, which is what turns an archive into a place designers want to be listed.
What I built
A right-to-left layout, not a mirrored one
The site is Persian throughout. Direction affects the grid, the filters, the navigation and every icon that implies motion, and it has to be built in rather than flipped at the end.
Reusable components across the archive
The gallery, the exhibition section and the designer profiles are the same pieces arranged differently, so a change to a card is a change everywhere it appears.
The exhibition as part of the site
Basteha runs an annual international packaging exhibition. Winners and past participants live in the same system as the archive rather than in a separate microsite that dies each year.
Persian typography
Persian type sets differently: longer ascenders, connected forms, and line heights that break if you carry Latin defaults over. I picked a contemporary Persian typeface and set the scale around it, on a site whose audience judges typography for a living.
Where it stands
The archive is live and is used as the reference point for packaging design in Iran, with designers listed against their work and manufacturers browsing by category.