About / the person in the loop
Half logic.
Half instinct.
Fully human.
Hanif Bahari is a Stockholm-based full-stack developer, designer, and visual artist. He works between code and drawing, bringing the same attention to structure, rhythm, clarity, and human experience to both.
One practice
Art and software are not parallel careers for Hanif; they are two ways of working through the same questions. Both begin with observation, turn complexity into structure, and depend on making relationships visible. Drawing gives the work immediacy and character. Engineering gives it systems, behavior, and reach.
A life in drawing
His artistic path began in childhood, when drawing—especially cartoons—quickly became both a talent and an obsession. Through the 1990s he trained in academic drawing and oil painting, later expanding that foundation while studying Industrial Design at Azad University’s Art and Architecture Department in Tehran.
His first published cartoon appeared in a major Iranian newspaper in 2001. Two solo cartoon exhibitions and one group exhibition followed before he relocated to Sweden in 2012. In 2014, he presented his caricature work in Gothenburg.
Design as a bridge
Industrial design created an early connection between visual judgment and practical systems. From 2015 to 2017, Hanif continued that inquiry at Mid Sweden University in Sundsvall, completing a Master of Arts in the Design for All program. Its human-centered perspective remains part of how he approaches interfaces, products, and communication.
Code as material
His professional web-development experience began at ParsTech Solutions in 2007. Since then, his work has moved across user-experience design, independent game development, WordPress, frontend architecture, and full-stack product engineering. Uncle Magnuz—an iPhone game he conceived, programmed, illustrated, animated, and released independently—made the relationship between his two practices especially direct.
More recent work includes React modernization and design-system development for Bazarma, custom web delivery for Swedish agencies, and full-stack development at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, where he maintained more than 30 Node.js applications and contributed to public digital systems. His current engineering toolkit centers on TypeScript, React, Next.js, and Node.js, supported by the product and visual thinking that came first.
The work now
Today, Hanif’s practice brings software development, editorial cartooning, and painting into one body of work. A project such as ViraChin applies engineering to the visual problem of Persian typography, while his cartoons use image, metaphor, and composition to examine power and its consequences. The outputs differ, but the impulse is consistent: understand the system, find the essential form, and make it felt.