Interview with U,N,A Collective

Katya Hudson

I would like to start by asking why Kharkiv, and how did you begin there? Do you think there is something specific that makes the Kharkiv school, from which the main graphic designer figures you mentioned came, different from other places in its approach to graphic design?

Uliana, Aliona (U,N,A Collective)

Well, we all came from the Kharkiv Academy of Design and Art (Харківська державна академія дизайну та мистецтв), and it is Aliona’s native city. After some time and distance, it became important to us to start a project about the Academy and its context. Around 2016-2017 we began to plan the research; it had been 10 years or more since we had finished our studies. But, aside from personal interest, Kharkiv was very important to Ukraine and to the education system of the Soviet Union, a hotbed for industry at the time.

Kharkiv was a well-known educational and scientific hub, now known as a developed industrial city with many factories. There, unlike in other cities, the art school specialized in design. For instance, the school of Lviv focused on decorative arts, the Kyiv school on painting, whereas Kharkiv had a specific focus on industrial art which had been developing since the ’20s. Kharkiv really did play an integral role, and what the Kharkiv school of graphics, its designers and graphics made for industry was central to the story of graphic design of Ukraine.¹ From the point of view of a graphic designer looking at the visual environment in Ukraine today, it is blatant that the contemporary methods of creating logotypes are really different to the Soviet past. So, we decided to go back to Kharkiv and its archive, as designers of a different generation, to begin this dialogue with our professors as professionals —and not only as our tutors —, approaching graphic design to document its history, its legacy, and to show its significance and its influence in Ukraine. For us, the underlying question was not, moreover, a question of aesthetics, but the question of a research carried out by these graphic designers from the pure form to the logotype, and the methods used to create them.

Véronique Marrier

In an article on Telegraf Design² (November 2, 2017), you mention that you would really like to see the works of the Chamber of Commerce of Kyiv and Odesa. Are there archives there, is the connection between design and industry there, as present as it is in Kharkiv?

Uliana, Aliona (U,N,A Collective)

No, unfortunately, all the Soviet archives were lost during the Perestroika time. However, State Archive of Higher Authorities and Public Administration of Ukraine preserved some important official sources. Although these were not archives concerning graphic design, they contained documents belonging to various state organisations – as the Art Council of the Ukrainian branch of the All-Union Chamber of Commerce.³ These archives are thus not necessarily connected to culture, but we discovered documents from various meetings and art council gatherings; minutes, and transcripts, where logotypes and proposals by designers for trademarks were examined and criticized by the committees. By these means, we were able to find out the names of the designers, the titles of firms, factories, for whom these marks were produced. The graphic material we found was mainly from the private archives of designers who created the trademarks.

David Crowley

May I ask how you, as young women growing up in the post-Soviet era, feel about going back and looking at Soviet history? Does this seem like a strange country to be entering? Is it like you are traveling back in time, but to another world, to another country?

Aliona, Uliana (U,N,A Collective)

As we were born in the eighties, during our childhood we were surrounded by a lot of the aesthetics from the Soviet Union. As students in the Academy of Design and Arts, our professors⁴ in the design department, the majority of whom worked for the Kharkiv Chamber of Commerce, involved us in this aesthetics, they were really connected. It is even possible to say that this aesthetics were our basis. Later, when we began to see and explore the international world of design, we of course noticed the differences: we were taught graphic design as visual communication, with inherited ideas from predigital modernism and functionalism. The prohibitions and issues of the Soviet experience were layered on it: not ideological, but rather production restrictions, and possibly psychological. What we discovered for ourselves later – unlimited expressive means, picturesqueness, emotionality. This is why it was interesting to return to our studies and explore the work and the ethos of that system in detail. In the contemporary graphic design industry in Ukraine, we saw no connection with this past. How those designers in 1960-80s, the majority of whom held a Fine Arts education, created shapes, interested in their forms and their possibilities. The way in which they worked came from woodcutting, from craft/analog printing techniques.⁵

As we also felt a rupture between our generations and practices, we asked ourselves who these people were in our history. This is why we have paid such attention to Volodymyr Pobiedin (1918-2006), considering him as a figure who has done important work in the developing of graphic practices.

Véronique

Was it the temptation to go against the Soviet conception as in school we often try to push the limits or to go against the system?

Uliana, Aliona, Nika (U,N,A Collective)

To be honest, the previous generation of designers was much more opposed to this Soviet modernist tradition than we were.⁶ The ’80s generation tried to be post-modern and was very interested in western approaches. But our generation came after this, when studying didn’t pay as much attention to the split between the two. However, we also were looking for something new, something fresh, some postmodern aesthetic. Our rebellion took place in the 2000s, we decided to go back to and look at the roots of our school. Through research and this desire to build a collection, an archive, which could inform us precisely about the phenomena taking place that shaped these different approaches. What is the spirit of the Kharkiv school? Does it exist or is it just a myth, an urban legend? We decided to dive into this heritage, this time looking from a distance. Also, perhaps was important to explore these roots, as living in this digital era where it seems that everyone who has a computer can be a graphic designer. But is that enough? By going back to the modernist approach or the very constructive Ukrainian Avantgarde, we wanted to understand our surroundings in Ukraine, from the ’20s until the 2000s.

Véronique

And was it possible to trace the connections between designers and commissioners? Did the latter know how to communicate in terms of type or logo identity with the graphic designer? Looking at the documents you gathered – works, reports, etc., what was the organisation between industry and designer like? How did they work together, and did you find anything about the amount of money they had?

Nika, Aliona, Uliana (U,N,A, Collective)

At times, it was very strange to read the reports and minutes (Fig. 1 and Fig. 2). Some comments were very concise and others very detailed, with different suggestions about forms or types. But as we did not and could not see the creations, and most of the time could not even find them, we could only imagine. It was quite entertaining to envisage and integrate our research with remarks like: “Delete the leaves, they’re too decorative. And make the shape clearer!” or even “it’s horrible. It’s horrible. That type is horrible!”⁷

These documents also mentioned the designer’s fees for different jobs such as posters and trademarks or packaging. This was very valuable when trying to determine the activity or economic weight of the graphic design. We also got to know the political bureaucracy and the fact that in the Soviet era nothing could be done without it.

David

Do you see a connection between Volodymyr Pobiedin and the Ukrainian Avantgarde of the 1920s and ’30s?

Uliana, Nika, Aliona (U,N,A, Collective)

We see a connection with the aesthetics of twenties graphics through Vasyl Yermylov (Fig. 3, Fig. 4 and Fig. 5) and Boris Kosariv who were also in Kharkiv and worked at the Academy as Pobiedin. It was interesting to explore this connection considering there was a really big gap.

Actually, the two main gaps in the history of Graphic Design in Ukraine are first the ’30-’50s (the Stalin repressions and the World War II); and then, the ’90s, during the Perestroika when all the archives were lost. We tried to fill these gaps in with our research, really trying to trace the connection between these eras and the graphic forms which they generated. Pobiedin had a really long professional life and his sheer productivity was impressive. Working from the sixties to the eighties. In addition, he was also a very talented professor and a very influential teacher; we can see this in the interviews with his students.⁸ Although he was really gifted in graphic design, curiously, he came from a ceramics background.

Katya

You agree with Pobiedin in many ways, you understand his importance and you seem to relate to him, but is there anything you do differently? And is there anything you have learned from him, but which you know in your own practice you don’t want to do or don’t see the point of? Maybe you can just tell us the difference between you as designers in the contemporary world?

Nika, Uliana, Aliona (U,N,A Collective)

He was very good in certain quite specific areas. Specializing in trademarks, working with black and white shapes and finding the balance and tension in them. He worked at this for years and years, made many interesting decisions in the combinations, but his understanding of design was very narrow. We now have a broader variety, more options for work. Pobiedin’s work is only just a part of the puzzle of modern graphic design, but it was a very significant piece. Pobiedin’s designs were very varied and impressive, despite the limited tools with which he expressed himself. His work is an important foundation, a place to begin.

David

Can I ask about the emphasis on logotypes? I’m wondering if it would be possible to do the same kind of research for other types of graphic objects.

Uliana, Nika, Aliona (U,N,A Collective)

As practitioners the main interest for us was to look at the rules that organise graphic creations. We consider these logos to be more than just logos or visual identities. Rather, we see this body of work as a method of form creation, which can spread and be used in different areas. Through different exercises of re-appropriating these forms,⁹ we really tried to show this method in the forms we present.

We also decided to concentrate on trademarks because other forms of Soviet design, for example, posters and other kinds of propaganda aesthetic, were already well known. While on trademarks, there are only maybe a few books of small print runs, only available to a small audience, unknown even amongst designers in Ukraine.

David

Can I offer a slightly provocative argument? I think it was difficult to be a graphic designer in the Soviet Union because there was a discourse that found commercialism difficult and ideologically the Soviet Union wanted to create a different kind of economy. A logotype, in the field of commerce, was a stable, immutable and clear graphic design object, quite different from advertising. In a way, wasn’t this a good space for socialist design? Do you think this argument makes sense?

Uliana (U,N,A Collective)

Do you mean that the logotype was not used for trade?

David

It was the socialist market, and it was slowly changing. It was clear. The logotypes that you have collected – but also more broadly the logotypes of that time in the socialist republics – gave an identity, which was very Soviet. There was no deception. There was no alienation. It wasn’t about commercial aesthetics; it was about identity. I know that in Poland, for example, logo design was an interesting space for designers to work in, whereas advertising was a much more problematic space. I wonder if this is also similar to the Ukrainian situation?

Nika, Uliana, Aliona (U,N,A Collective)

Yes, you are right. The fact is that the situation was very artificial. There was no natural market to shape this process, there were only Soviet laws, and they were not based on market losses or real advertising principles. If the Government decided that every plant and factory should have trademarks, then trademark designers made them. They did not have to think complexly about a client’s desires or something, that was the main factor for designing in the real life of the “Western World”. It was a very insular situation. On the other hand, when our Polish colleagues see our research, they think that we are following this tradition of Soviet graphic designers and that they are themselves freer. For us, this viewpoint looks like a kind of strange romanticism. Anyway, the practice was free of propaganda or symbols of Soviet ideology. In fact, the graphic designers were creating these shapes with symbols of industrial and everyday life objects, fruits, or vernacular and not with the common symbols of the Soviet ideology as stars, hammers or Lenin’s profile!

David

In a way, I think there is a lot of dignity in this design. These designers could show how creative they were. They could use their art without producing the same kind of propaganda as the posters for Lenin’s birthday or May Day, right? It’s quite a difficult job before the advent of digital tools, you could be that designer with dignity. But could you be a modernist, really, without being an ideologue? Is that a coherent idea?

Uliana, Aliona (U,N,A Collective)

Creating compositions was honest work according to whom we interviewed.¹⁰ There were not so many fields where you could have legal work with abstract forms because it would often be described as degenerative art in other fields. Somehow graphic designers of trademarks, dealing like with the shaping of marks were luckily free of this fate. Able to work abstractly, creating interesting forms using interpretations of basic elements of everyday life in their own way.

Véronique

Perhaps, it’s because trademark graphics is an applied art and was connected with companies, with function, industry. But on the other hand, when you have to create a poster, you can add a lot of personal work or intentions or creations, don’t you?

Uliana, Nika, Aliona (U,N,A Collective)

Not in a Soviet poster design. Initially, the profession of graphic designer did not exist. Graphic designers were all artists functioning in a marginalized area of working, in aesthetic isolation on non-prestigious items. But at the same time, in this, there was a space for some freedom in a professional sense. Most of this work was connected to policies of the time, 1962 law that obligated all the industrial factories to have a trademark, therefore they needed professionals to do work with this.

Véronique

We are talking about logos, so we are mainly talking about shapes, but what about all the other types of work – signage, various charters, etc. – that contribute to the visual identity of companies?

Aliona, Nika, Uliana (U,N,A Collective)

Actually, we found only one visual identity project as a full identity and it was a project of Corporate identity for All-union ‘Soyuzsil’gosptehnika’ that was printed in a very famous magazine Technical Aesthetics Техническая эстетика. This agricultural firm’s identity, maybe the first and the biggest identity done in that field, was made in the very beginning of the seventies. It is a rare study case of a real corporate identity graphic design that we can really observe. It was a group of artists: Anatolii Sumar, Leonid Rabinovych, Borys Kharyk who worked on this identity. This full identity included typeface, signage, printed material, and brochures (Fig. 6 and Fig. 7). To this day we can still spot it in the countryside on some signage, it is still alive. We also found some later complex projects in the late seventies and eighties from Volodymyr Lesniak (Corporate identity for 50 years of Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology,1978 (Fig. 8 and Fig. 9).

But these exceptional projects aside, what was generally needed was just a mark, like something to stamp a piece of pottery, something to put on the tractor, easily produced and traceable.

The Antonov aeroplane plant was a very interesting example we studied. At first, by the end of the ’50s, the planes were not marked, as secret projects, unbranded, to keep the USA from knowing or tracing the aircraft back to where they had been produced. So, there was no branding. Later, the Antonov aircraft factory started participating in fairs abroad and began to offer many souvenir items, etc. An unusual order of things at first. And then there was the law that required all businesses – from companies to factories – to have their own brand. This phenomenon of obtaining a trademark was linked to the Soviet Union’s need to obtain foreign currency, by entering world trade to exchange certain goods, which led to a new need for trademarks used outside the country.

David

Could you describe a little bit the function of VNIITE as you understand it? Because this is a quite different system for thinking about design research.

Aliona, Nika

It is perhaps important to describe the difference between the two organisations we are exploring in this research; the Chamber of Commerce was managing commissions and was focused on certain items, while in VNIITE,¹¹ a kind of technical institute, graphic designers were much more involved in research and experimentation,¹² they would set design trends. For example, the agricultural identity that we talked about earlier was made entirely by a VNIITE group of artists who were working in the Kyiv branch. We have concentrated in the VNIITE on this theme of graphic identity, but it is important to note that the VNIITE also carried out broader work: industrial design could be studied in terms of techniques, engineering and machines, but also for everyday products. The main idea of these institutions was to introduce science into design, with the conviction that certain principles and methods could be developed to make the design process highly functional.

David

Yes, there is two ways of thinking about VNIITE. One; it is like many islands of freedom where designers, scientists, engineers had resources and space to design and to be creative, like a zone of freedom. On the other hand, it can also be assumed that it is a network that extends from Moscow to the whole of the Soviet Union and tries to control designers, resources and the economy. Which views seem the more relevant to you? Freedom or control?

Aliona

These two directions are always struggling against each other, and, in fact, always come together. It is always a balance between the two. It is an eternal question. Even now, while we have freedom of expression, trends for example also exert forms of control, from Instagram likes to other types of algorithms that control us.

David

But I’m curious if that is a national network or a Soviet one. Is your project, in your opinion, more Ukrainian or more Soviet in its framework? This is an important moment now where we have to celebrate Ukrainian culture to prevent its destruction. Do you see your project as a celebration of Ukrainian culture?

Aliona, Uliana, Nika (U,N,A, Collective)

Above all, we see our project as a returning of the names of design professionals.

This question about Ukrainian aesthetic features haunts us. Let’s try to examine the point. For instance, we can see that Vasyl Yermilov’s approach to constructivism was based on Ukrainian folk art. He produced his own way of thinking, by adding vernacular motifs – flowers and colours – to geometric or pure forms. (Fig. 10) In a way it is a very Ukrainian constructivism, but it is difficult to define. Over the past few months, we have discussed this topic a lot: a way to distinguish Ukrainian design. We still have not come up with a short list, a guide to what makes a shape or an approach Ukrainian. Maybe it is for the next stage of research. Regardless, all kind of archiving and gathering of projects from the past is useful. And it is important for culture. It does not depend on what history is, we should look through it and attempt to understand its logic.

Katya

I also wonder what the significance is to you of archiving and documenting something that has not been documented before? In the current climate have you managed to save creations that could have been destroyed?

Nika (U,N,A, Collective)

To put it simply and directly, the libraries, museums, private flats we visited in Kharkiv have all been attacked since 24 February 2022. Some of them are damaged and the archives are now in physical danger. We are not sure that they will still exist outside our book after the war is over.

David

It’s really interesting that you are designers and practitioners. You were not trained as historians after all…

Aliona (U,N,A, Collective)

For us, the idea was really to approach this research as practitioners. We had a lot of questions about our professional life. Perhaps that is why we wanted to work with other specialists, inviting art critics to create the verbal context for this study. We focused on working as practitioners: gathering the trademarks to form a catalogue of approaches. Mixing trademarks from different years, we wanted to highlight these approaches. We heard some criticism, that you can see a logo from the twenties following a logo from the sixties and then a logo from the nineties.

The research aims to show these connections, how design practices have developed and influenced each other.

Véronique

You focus on history, your education, the school and the people that were important to you. Can you tell us a little bit more about your practice as a designer? What is your design process? How is it connected to a Ukrainian identity? And how is your work a kind of step in Ukrainian visual history?

Aliona, Uliana, Nika (U,N,A, Collective)

Recently, the tendency to work on cultural projects, to create identities that could be based on some Ukrainian fine arts or artists of the previous decades in different media and genres has appeared or strongly increased. (See the following duet examples: Fig.11 and Fig.12; Fig.13 and Fig.14 ; Fig.15 and Fig.16.)

Interesting connections can arise from contact with the past. Take Yermilov’s work (Fig. 17); this graphic work is not only interesting but also useful in this perspective. He has many approaches and uses interesting solutions. Maybe today we use more international approaches, forms made with universally accessible tools such as Adobe Illustrator, but the connections and a mix of these diverse influences are important.

It is also important to think about the Ukrainian context. Although we are interested in some international designs, it is essential to realize that some of them are not suitable for Ukraine, Ukrainian companies, and its cultural backgrounds. That is why this specific graphic language that can be interpreted in a contemporary way of design is central. Using some specific elements from these fine artworks makes for interesting solutions for contemporary Ukrainian design.

There are many factors to consider, that are specific to Ukraine, production limits and the idea for graphic design, whatever it is, an identity or a book really depends on the possibilities in production.

Our surroundings, the aesthetics of streets and architecture also shows us the kind of graphic design that fits it. For example, if we talk about the Kharkiv school, we clearly use the approaches taught and used by our teachers, but in a different way. The rules place certain limits on our heads. And on the other hand, we have the desire to push these limits and go further. This balance between limits and our desire to go against them seems to us to be the essence of our design practice.

Véronique

You talked about typography, and I understood that you didn’t find such specific information about the use of typography or the creation of typefaces in the archives. What is your relationship with typography? How do you use it? How do you choose your fonts? I’m also wondering about the use of colour, because while all the historical work you show is in black and white, some of yours is brightly coloured? How does what you have learned explain the way you use colour in your work?

Aliona, Uliana (U,N,A, Collective)

Type is interesting in Ukrainian graphic design. In our research, we just show only a couple of examples of this wide medium. You can spot it in the work of Yermilov and Kosariev, their experiments from the ’20s and ’30s with letters and deconstruction are very post-modern.

In the Ukrainian graphic works it is possible to highlight how some lines can be influenced by Art Deco. There is also a real difference with Rodchenko’s typefaces for example.

In the research, we show type as a part of the logotypes. The nice thing about trademarks and logotypes is they can both be a picture and typography, the letters themselves creating connections between form and content. Although in general, we decided not to focus on types, we can still feel its influence and especially in the work of Vasyl Krychevskyi, Vasyl Yermilov. Now, there is even a new generation of Ukrainian designers who are trying to restore this, working in typefaces based on the graphics of 20th-century artists. For us, typography is really a matter of context.

Véronique

What about colour?

Nika, Uliana, Aliona (U,N,A, Collective)

In our research we also used colour as one of the ways to reimagine and rework archive graphics, to bring a new voice or emotion. It also added new materiality because in the Soviet times they did not have Pantone colours. We decided to show this relatability between Ukrainian designers and for example, Dutch designers who used vivid colours in the sixties. So we decided to use these bright Pantone colours in the exercises to show how the simple use of colour “transgressed” “Soviet graphic design” in a new way.