The objective of this study is to locate and historicize the basic visual components of the idealized figure of the nation/subject to understand the ways in which the discourse of modernity and the construction of nation is represented and consumed in the formative stages of graphic design in Iran. For the purpose of such visual analysis in this study, advertisement is understood as a visual narrative constructed based on an idea of the future with the power to persuade its viewer into action and/or consumption. In other words, advertisement and its relation to space and subject formation is itself defined as an analytical category. Such definition of advertisement is argued to be crucial in the understanding of the transformation of the language of graphic design in Iran that is embedded in the discourse of modernization/modernity. The theoretical engagement is with the notions of stylistic arrangement of artistic modernity that are temporal and devoid of historiographical specificity. This paper proposes that, instead of stylistic shifts or borrowings, it is the different modes of engagement with space and subject that mark the decisive shifts of paradigm in the artistic production. This alternative vision of renewal will therefore not be achieved in temporal relation to present or retrospectively – as stylistic categorization often is – but rather rooted in narration of a history, re-imagined. The three newspapers of Mulla Nasr Al-Din, Nahid, Iran-e Bastan, and Iran-e Emrooz, that form the primary sources of this inquiry, are sampled based both on the breadth of visual strategies used in these publications and the time period they cover. The choice itself does not necessarily imply that these publications are chosen as the representatives of the diverse range of visual publications of the time. It is however, understood and argued that there are fundamental strategies – both formal and contextual – that is shared between them. As such, these basic visual formulations can be shown to correspond to the prevalent socio-political discourse of the time and thus traced in other contemporaneous publications as well. The paper thus aims to highlight the instability of the constructed categories of nation, national subject/space and progress/modernity.