Hrvatsko dizajnersko društvo / Croatian Designers Association

“I think that designers still have to put an effort into bringing awareness to the public and their clients about understanding our profession and the benefits that design engagement brings. One of our problems is the fact that the market is small and that makes certain production challenges too complicated or unprofitable. Culture and self-initiative projects have always pushed Croatian design, and I think that will not change, but I also hope that better connectivity will remove the borders and that designers with quality solutions will be able to reach the wider public.” – INTERVIEWED BY: Ora Mušćet

“The visual provocation was the holy grail. We played with taboos and national and international symbols. We were lucky enough to work with some of the most audacious characters and to learn from them. The challenge was to create small or big visual mischief with regard to forbidden topics: Tito, the Party, partisans, communists… It was a favourite mantra of rock performers as well as theatre directors, writers, and even us, the designers, who were lucky enough to work for them. We happily took on this challenge and wanted to create some kind of our own pop art and we had a really good time doing it.” – interviewed by: ORA MUŠĆET

“There are two of us in the Bachrach & Krištofić tandem. We wanted to express different states and ideas with photographs. Mario behind the lens and me in front of it – I could have been anyone. Back then, changing identities or roles was not just for the camera, it was a part of everyday life. I wore men’s suits and ties, wore intense dark makeup, wore tulle and nylon clothes. In our own way, we wanted to say that all these roles, the people who are a part of us, are equal. Self-referentiality points to one’s own situation, the subject.” – interviewed by: Ora Mušćet

“Writers and editors (and magazine art directors) should not be the story. We bring our experience and knowledge to a subject, but a magazine is for its readers – whom we presume to want the best words and the most appropriate pictures for each feature or review. Magazine-making is not a form of self-expression. Having said that, there will always be parts of one’s personality that leak through, and that occurs in designing, too. ” – INTERVIEWED BY: MARKO GOLUB

“Unmistakably belonging to our time, particularly with respect to the use of typography and the choice of typographic fonts, Cuculić’s style de¬veloped for Gavella is still basically eclectic. In a way, his theatre posters are also a reflection on what has been done in this specific genre through¬out its glorious history, including the golden age of the sixties and the seventies when the poster as a promo¬tional medium was still relevant and represented the pinnacle of creative expression.” – written by: MARKO GOLUB

“The first half of the 80s was the time, after all, of what was called the New Image, the trans-avant-garde, the painting of memory, neo-Expressionism… concepts and names of artists easily spotted on Martinis’ posters of the time, and he felt that the landscape format corresponded best to the idea of the painting. Martinis, an artist of different orientations and interests from those of the then dominant “return to the image and painting”, has a clear and critical distance from these phenomena, often from artists for whose GSU exhibitions he did posters. He points this out as one of the reasons for his loss of interest in this kind of job, but also as a spur to some quite uncommon approaches.”- WRITTEN BY: MARKO GOLUB & DEJAN KRŠIĆ

“We who endeavoured to develop media practices and work with an awareness of the social and urban context in which we lived in graphic design we saw a chance to expand our field of action. The poster is something that belongs to the urban space and communicates directly with passers-by, which was certainly interesting for me because in the seventies I developed a very clear critical attitude to artistic institutions, museums, galleries, academies and so on.” – INTERVIEWED BY: MARKO GOLUB

A designer who is usually recognised as good at what he or she does quite often exudes that glamorous aura of an inspired individual. However, good design oftentimes remains hidden behind the anonymous and the collective (in big agencies, for instance) or behind the omnipresent and almost undetectable, behind miniature, yet strategically important modifications and transformations of long-lasting brands, etc. One of the advantages of this sort of exhibition format for presenting design is that it provides a general idea about what is perceived as a good standard, an “example of good practice”, a benchmark of excellence. Since design has never been only “one thing” (and certainly it is not today), but rather many different things, it would be naive to talk about some universal standard. – WRITTEN BY: MARKO GOLUB

Cover photo: Brigitte Lacombe Susan Sellers is a founding partner and creative director of 2×4 and Senior Design Critic at Yale School of Art. At 2×4, she leads a wide range of strategy and design projects in the cultural, commercial and urban sectors, from large-scale brand identity and…

“The way you approach and deal with the specificities and issues of the form you are working on has become, in time, a characteristic of your aesthetics, or to put it simply, a part of your authorial language. When for years one does editorial design, ones starts to think like that too: what is seen at first sight, how to involve the reader into a story, where is the beginning, what is the most important information, hierarchy, is design presenting the content and similar. However, that is often the case of a game of “wrong form”, when for example you design a poster that looks like a tram ticket, likewise a newspaper page can be a poster, a book cover or a festival flyer” – INTERVIEWED BY: MARKO GOLUB