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Interdict

Simna Naeem

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I’m Simna, a Pakistani artist and designer exploring the relationship between identity, visibility, and resistance through visual storytelling. After completing my pre-degree studies online, I’m now pursuing Communication Design at CSM. My work spans branding, typography, murals, and motion graphics; often grounded in themes like feminism, cultural norms, selfhood, and the politics of perception.

I’m particularly interested in how design can expose systems of control, question internalized expectations, and reclaim space. Through a balance of aesthetic clarity and conceptual depth, I aim to create work that doesn’t just communicate — it disrupts, reflects, and invites new ways of seeing.

I’m Simna, a Pakistani artist and designer exploring the relationship between identity, visibilit...

Interdict is a typeface born from surveillance; not external, but internal. What began as a study of censorship in Pakistan, inspired by voices like Sarmad Khoosat’s, shifted into something more personal during the recent India–Pakistan war. As polarized media shaped public belief, I started questioning my own truths. Was I being honest with myself, or just repeating what I’d been conditioned to accept?

Drawing from Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, Camus’s The Stranger, and the visual language of Gerald Scarfe and Mona Hatoum, this project investigates how constant observation by systems, people, and ourselves alters our identity. Interdict distorts Helvetica, the “neutral” voice, into something anxious and redacted.

Final work

A poster with white text on a black noisy background. The text says "VISIBILITY","IS A" and "TRAP' with redacted version of Helvetica

Visibility is a trap

“Visibility is a trap.” Foucault’s words used in the typeface. Born from erasure and redaction, the letters echo panoptic control fractured forms shaped by what's missing. Just like the watched inmate begins to watch themselves, this design speaks to how we edit ourselves under invisible systems.

This poster is a visual interpretation of the quote. The composition deliberately oscillates between chaotic freedom and sudden restriction, guiding the viewer’s eye across the canvas only to confine it sharply at the centre. This central zone, a dense, closeted core, serves as a metaphorical and visual trap. A moment of arrest that embeds itself into the viewer’s memory like a glitch in perception. The overall layout mimics the rhythm of a looping barcode; systematic yet fractured, underscoring themes of internalised surveillance. Surveillance becomes style, and silence becomes structure.

Redacted typeface with negative space on every intersecting point of each alphabet

Interdict

Origin Font: Helvetica

(used intentionally for its association with neutrality, modernism and mass standardization (metaphor for default brain)

Conceptual Core:

Interdict is what happens when Helvetica gets watched.

A clean, rational system redacted as a result of constant internal monitoring

Visual Charactersistics:

Base structure: Helvetica skeleton still vaguely present, its memory remains

Line intersection: Sharp, cutting lines bisect the glyphs, redaction

Weight imbalance: Certain parts overcompensate, symbolizing overcorrection.

Perfect for Projects dealing with censorship, internal conflict, psychological distortion, obfuscation and societal control

Not meant to be legible, communicates the discomfort of being watched; even by yourself

poster with the qoute visibility is a trap

Book Cover

Research and process

Slide show experiments, GIFs and the process of composing the final poster
  • research and key influences
  • two character designs based on internalized surveillance and sketchbook pages of intial ideation for the typeface

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Interdict

Interdict is a typeface born from surveillance; not external, but internal. What began as a study of censorship in Pakistan, inspired by voices like Sarmad Khoosat’s, shifted into something more personal during the recent India–Pakistan war. As polarized media sh...

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