New York-based Indian designer Seher Anand creates a research-led printed book that examines migration through architecture, passports, border systems, national symbols and carried objects, treating every design decision as part of the narrative it is building.
The frustration that generated Migrant Landscape was specific: migration is too often framed as a crisis caused by people, rather than as a condition embedded in how societies, borders, nations and objects are designed. Seher Anand’s response was to make a book that shifts the frame entirely.
“Our world is designed to create certain realities, from borders and passports to architecture, objects, and systems of belonging,” she says. “I wanted Migrant Landscape to examine design as political, not just aesthetic.”
The publication moves across three sections: A Fabricated Realm, examining physical environments, national identity and movable culture; Across Odysseys, tracing movement across water; and Limbo and Permanence, exploring memory, home and the idea that home can be carried and reconstructed. Essays, visual research, case studies from around the world and interviews are placed in relation to architecture, passport systems, national symbols, artists’ works and the specific objects people carry with them. Design is treated throughout as a political tool capable of producing belonging, exclusion, mobility and permanence.
The printed structure reinforces this. Each section uses a distinct paper stock, allowing shifts in context and narrative to register physically with the reader. The three interior stocks, Mist, White Frost and Natural on 130gsm, create a subtle but perceptible rhythm of texture and weight as the book progresses.
“The book is not outside the politics it examines,” Anand says. “Every design decision, from the typography to the sequencing to the images I chose or left out, becomes part of the narrative. That awareness was important to me because Migrant Landscape is not just about migration, but about how design shapes a way of seeing and understanding it.”
The publication was bound by Henry Bookbinding Co. in Lower Manhattan and recognised with an ADC Annual 104th Merit.
Seher Anand is a New York-based Indian designer working across editorial, identity and spatial applications, rooted in typography, research and concept-led visual systems.
Website: seheranand.cargo.site Instagram: @seheranand
Migrant Landscape. Printed book, 7 × 9.5 in. Digital print, 90lb cream cover, 130gsm interior stocks in Mist, White Frost and Natural. Bound by Henry Bookbinding Co., Lower Manhattan. ADC Annual 104th Merit.
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