Many questions—not necessarily new—on the state of communication design have in recent years become relevant once again: what is the social purpose of graphic design today? What forms does critical graphic design take and which mediums does it use these days? What are the methods designers use today to advance their message about the world? Does an internet meme today have the same communication function that the poster used to have? What is the impact of an image in the image-obsessed, image-saturated world?

More broadly, at the time when design is routinely seen in the popular media as an aid to sales, how can designers reclaim the critical potential of their profession? And even more broadly, can communication design, in its various contemporary forms, be a medium of critical discourse about the multi-faceted problems of today’s societies—like the slogan or a protest song?

In order to shed some light on these questions, the City Museum of Ljubljana will host a one day event with lectures and talks by and with professionals from the field of design: Bojan Hadžihalilović, Dejan Kršić, Rick Poynor, Borut Vild.

Conceived by Ajdin Bašić
Moderated by Petra Černe Oven

Bojan Hadžihalilović

(Sarajevo)

20 years ago Bojan Hadžihalilović was one of the founders of the Trio Sarajevo design studio. In the beginning the Studio was involved in records, news magazines, theatre and film posters, as well as book design. After the war a group of designers behind the studio established the Fabrika-Sarajevo agency that has been engaged in design, computer graphics, TV animation, TV commercial production and marketing communication. The works of the Trio Group and Agency Fabrika have been publicised in the following magazines: Graphis, Print, How, Step inside Design, Life, Newsweek, The Face, Creative Review, Art Press, Print, Flash Art, as well as in publications Anatomy of Design, Innovative Promotions at Work, The Design of Dissent, Graphic Agitation II, Evil doesn’t live Here, Political posters in Central and Eastern Europe 45-95, Bound les Borders, etc. Bojan Hadžihalilović teaches visual communication and is Head of the Department for Graphic Design at the Academy of the Fine Arts in Sarajevo.

Dejan Kršić

(Zagreb)

Dejan Kršić was born in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1961. He graduated in history of art and ethnology from the Faculty of Arts, Zagreb. He works as a graphic designer, publicist and translator. He is a member of Croatian Designers Association (HDD) and Associate Professor at the Department of Visual Communications Design, Arts Academy, Split. He is mainly active as graphic designer for cultural projects (books, catalogues, newspapers, music records, etc.), and in the independent culture/activism scene. In the 1990s he co-founded Arkzin magazine, where he was Graphics Editor and later also Editor-in-Chief. Since 2000 he has been a member of What, How & for Whom/WHW association for visual culture (together with Nataša Ilić, Ana Dević, Ivet Ćurlin and Sabina Sabolović), participating in local, regional, and international exhibition, media and publishing projects, such as »What, How & for Whom« – celebrating the 152th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto (Home of HDLU, Zagreb 2000, Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna 2001), Collective Creativity (Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, 2005), What keeps mankind alive (11th Istanbul biennale, Istanbul, Turkey), and in the implementation of the Nova Gallery, Zagreb exhibition programme. He contributed the text for the book on Boris Bućan (HDD, Zagreb 2006) and the monograph Mirko Ilić: strip / ilustracija / dizajn / multimedija (AGM & Profil International, Zagreb 2008; US edition Fist to Face [Print Books, F+W Inc, New York 2012.]). He was a member of the team curating the exhibition Socialism and Modernity (together with Ljiljana Kološnik, Dean Duda and Sandra Kržić Roban, MSU, Zagreb, 2011), and a contributing author to the accompanying publication (ed. Ljiljana Kolešnik; in English translation: Socialism and Modernity, Institut za povijest umjetnosti & MSU, Zagreb 2012).

Rick Poynor

(London)

Rick Poynor is a British writer, lecturer, and curator, specialising in design, photography and visual culture. He was founding editor of Eye magazine and co-founder of the Design Observer website. He is a columnist for the American magazine Print and his articles have appeared in Blueprint, Icon, Creative Review, Frieze, and many other publications. His books include Typographica (2001), No More Rules: Graphic Design and Postmodernism (2003) and Jan van Toorn: Critical Practice (2008). He has published three collections of essays: Design Without Boundaries (1998), Obey the Giant: Life in the Image World (2001) and Designing Pornotopia (2006). His latest book is Sergei Sviatchenko: Collages (2014).

Borut Vild

(Belgrade)

Borut Vild was born in Murska Sobota, Slovenia in 1954. He graduated from the Faculty of Applied Arts and Design, Graphic Design Department in Belgrade. He is the author of more than fifty visual identities, and designs for several hundreds of publications, books and magazines. As art director and designer he has collaborated with the Centre for Contemporary Art, Belgrade, the Belgrade Circle NGO, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade and Politika Newspaper and Magazines company. He has exhibited at twelve solo exhibitions and more than a hundred group exhibitions at home and abroad. His works have been published in respectable local and international magazines and publications. In years 2011–2012, he was Director of Education Zone, Mikser Festival, Belgrade. He is one of the founders of the International Conference ‘Designer: Author or Universal Soldier’ (2010-2013), which attracted the most significant authors from the region, Europe and the USA. He is Head of design seminars at Petnica Research Center, Valjevo, as well as Associate professor at the Faculty of Media and Communications, University Singidunum, Belgrade and the Faculty of Technical Sciences, Novi Sad.