Graphics in Us

Searching for such a project in the Czech environment would be in vain. Identity includes a narrative publication, a series, a film, and an exhibition. The story of Czech graphic design is thus retold using all available options. But what’s more, the creators man aged to do it in both an attractive and professional manner. That’s a rather uncommon combination.

Let’s now focus on the book — a voluminous publication that, by its very nature, contains the most essential information about the history and present of Czech graphics. Its editor, Linda Kudrnovská, structured the entire story into six separate units, starting with the republic’s  founding. The goal was to identify the principal parts through which the essential milestones could be easily mapped.

The concept cannot be faulted. The chapters Everyday Life, Public Space, Media, Books and Education, Statehood and Propaganda, and the last one, Beyond the Borders, create relatively unrestricted yet logically concluded, separate units through which the reader gets to know the key figures of the scene, historical milestones and then, of course, specific examples of utility graphics. If only because the creators’ ambition is to cover the entire period of the existence of the graphic design field in the Czech Republic, it is clear that you will come across a varied mix of different works here. Whether it is the Metro navigation system by Rostislav Vaňek, city logos, or Karlovy Vary Film Festival posters, they are always the most fundamental graphic works of their time. When leafing through a book of more than five hundred pages, one realizes  how much graphic design surrounds us. And how much we often do not even admit it. After all, that is one of the leitmotifs of the entire  publication. To clearly show that giving up on highquality graphic design is impossible. It is one of the fundamental tools shaping our culture, everyday work and private lives, too. All of this slowly but surely emerges from the book’s shell thanks to the interviews the editor conducted with personalities of the graphics scene. Those are among the book’s most interesting and beneficial parts. Their straightforwardness and humanity triumph over the technical parts with reproductions or even profiles of deceased important graphic designers, which basically present “dry” data à la Wikipedia.

Thanks to wellposed questions, knowledge of the context, and the obvious trust the authors have built with the graphic designers, we learn a lot of interesting facts and connections that place the graphic designers’ work in the light of authenticity. Understandably, not everyone  interviewed can open up to the point of stepping out of their PR image. Sometimes, these are just small hints, as in the case of Peter Babák,  the enfant terrible of the Czech scene, who deliberately makes it impossible for many people to get to his human core with his verbal  picturesque style. His effort to build an image of an “uncompromising revolutionary with the soul of a pubescent dude” can also be felt here. On the other hand, the book does not want to serve as critical therapy for the often extremely talented but also complex souls of graphic designers. The publication’s authors try to look into their studies’ periods, map their work’s begin nings and peaks, and occasionally hint at complicated circumstances.