STRELKA is an annual festival that presents modern design and includes exhibitions, projects` presentations, master-classes of competent designers and experimental projects of students. The festival is organized by the Mobile Design Academy, the Art Studio “RekinArt”, the design studio “Art-press”, with support of Russian Academy of Art, Nizhny Novgorod Art School and the Government of Nizhny Novgorod region. International design festival STRELKA is transforming into a new format in next year. Since 2016 the new name of STRELKA is International design biennale STRELKA.

This is one of my favorite projects. You hardly ever get to work with people who immediately understand and embrace everything you do. I want to thank Mokrousov Café’s team for that. It was a long project, and a lot of posters were made. For this, songs of this wonderful composer were listened to, selected and learnt by heart. A great deal of old photos and other material was looked through and selected. It was important for me to capture the state of mind that those songs carried, the innocence that you hear in their music and lyrics. This is how such bright, at times hardly matching colors appeared. And I had a point! While in Semenov, I saw a wooden house, dyed orange, with blue window trims, and many other bright, colorful houses and fences. Apart from posters, we made a series of postcards, a big calendar, advertising city-formats, etc.

The 12-poster series called “It’s Your History” is dedicated to the great personalities of Nizhny Novgorod. It was created as part of a social advertising project called “I am the City”. I suggested this theme at a City Council’s gathering. I didn’t realize then how time and energy consuming it was going to be. Although nobody placed any limits on me, I knew I was making those posters for the city; therefore they had to be understandable, readable, and easy to perceive and create the right kind of emotional appeal. I could not allow myself any designer gimmicks. All in all, I worked on this series for a month. Apart from creating the series itself, I had to collect all the necessary information and photo material. Besides, the posters are quite big in size (1200х1800 mm), so it took a lot of time to edit and save the files.

The poster series about Dostoyevsky is an important and very personal project for me. Working on it, I was to think of a word for each letter of the writer’s name so that it meant something related to an important event in his life. In order to fill the posters with his texts and quotations, I had to look through a lot of material about Dostoevsky, his works, letters, and memories. All this material made a great impression on me and helped me learn to see many things in life differently, while some of my convictions only became firmer.

Д — path; О — window, gaol; С — candles; Т — axe; О — оклад иконы (icon frame); Е — Gospel; В — faith; С — death; К — hard labor jail, shackles; И — game.

It was Peotr Bankov’s idea, for which I owe him a special thanks. He suggested having some sort of a poster marathon where we chose some song and each one made his own poster to it; quickly: a day, maximum two to create it. This is how non-stop 12 works were completed. Music is a part of every person’s life. It arouses emotions and creates images. It was really fascinating to transfer those images and moods to a blank sheet of paper with the help of graphic language and visualize your feelings in a poster.

This project was made from scratch, starting with naming; the only wish of the customer was that the name had to have the word “Art” in it. The word “Hole” was found in dictionaries; in the old times they sometimes used this word for small inns. The concept of the logo and graphic elements were accepted by the customer straightaway, without suggesting any changes. The project built up quickly, all the materials were made almost in a week. The interior design for the café was developed, and the redecoration began. We had prepared the printed materials, the decorative elements for the interior, but apparently the owners of the premises made the rent so high that we had to leave. Unfortunately, that was the end of the project.