OLD CASTLE | Heritage Brand Identity

Branding | Identity System | Cultural HeritageBrief: The Old Castle in Grodno is a 14th–16th century fortress, once the residence of Lithuanian grand dukes and Polish kings, now a museum. The problem: it reads as a monument, not a living place — and it has to stand out among several competing castle-museums in Belarus while speaking to very different visitors, from history teachers to students filming for social media.Idea: Don’t invent a palette — take it straight from the building. The castle’s own red roof and silver-blue dome became the brand’s only two accents, carried on white. The positioning follows the same logic: not an artifact under glass, but a Guardian — a living symbol that keeps the thread between past and present.Solution: A logo built from the dome’s silhouette, and a strict two-color system extended across every touchpoint — staff and guide badges, a printed guide, a scarf patterned from the castle gate’s ironwork, packaging, signage and the website.Result: A coherent, scalable identity that reads as alive rather than monumental — holding together across merchandise, staff branding and digital, and standing apart from every other castle-brand that still looks like a plain heritage site.

WHY FEMINISM DOESN’T NEED AESTHETICS | an editorial design for an essay on feminism and art

book design | typography | contemporary artBrief: design the layout for Rita Felski’s essay «Why Feminism Doesn’t Need Aesthetics» — a text about feminism’s internal contradiction: it criticizes aesthetics for putting «male» art on a pedestal for centuries while ignoring women, yet still needs aesthetics, because art is exactly what lets you speak, express yourself, and push back against injustice. The task was to make the design embody that contradiction, not illustrate it.Idea: turn the physical book into an unfolding argument. The cover becomes a «pink wrapper» — a deliberate stereotype the reader has to peel back to reach what matters: the names of the women who changed art. The essay’s key question — a quote from Lyudmila Bredikhina’s Forbes interview — is placed so it meets the reader the moment they open the book.Solution: the layout moves the reader from wrapper to substance. The pink «band» cover holds the stereotype on the outside. Inside, green text-free spreads create a pause for the reader’s own perception — a space to prepare before the real conversation about feminism and art begins. Captions are placed directly on the images instead of beside them: they break into the frame, disrupt the grid, and claim space for themselves, because a woman artist’s name has to be seen, not tucked away in a caption line.Result: a book where the typography lives out the essay’s conflict rather than describing it: the reader physically strips the stereotype off the cover, moves through the silent pause of the green pages, and arrives at the names the text insists on making visible. The book’s form becomes a second layer of Felski’s argument.

ТВАРЬ (THE CREATURE) | book for a play

book design | typography | contemporary dramaBrief: «Тварь» is Valery Semenovsky’s dramatic fantasy based on Fyodor Sologub’s novel «The Petty Demon» — the story of a literature teacher, Peredonov, descending into madness as he obsesses over a promotion and starts seeing conspiracies everywhere. He’s haunted by the Недотыкомка («the Untouchable Thing») — a small, grey, invented creature that his fear takes shape as. The brief was to make the layout itself perform Peredonov’s unraveling, not just typeset the text that describes it.Idea: treat the creature not as a character to illustrate, but as a typographic event. It isn’t described separately — it intrudes directly into Peredonov’s speech: before each of his lines, a ghostly echo of his own words appears, as if it were feeding him the line a second before he says it. It follows no rules, grows as his madness grows, and by the climax takes over not just his mind but the page itself.Solution: the creature gets its own typeface, Kommuna — cold and mechanical against the body text’s classical Scotch Micro (stage directions set in Scotch Modern italic). Its text is a shrunken, fragmentary pre-echo of Peredonov’s lines, breaking out of the six-column grid (body text sits on four), spilling into running heads and the main text block. Peredonov’s most self-revealing, ugly lines — the ones he genuinely delights in — are set apart in the text, with the creature «rejoicing» in the background. Derzhavin’s ode «God, ” stripped of its original devotional meaning, is read not by Peredonov but by the creature — signaled purely by the typeface switch. In the second half, the creature’s echo multiplies and crowds out the main text more aggressively, building to the final scene — a murder, where the creature visibly wins.Result: a layout where the character’s psychological collapse is legible before the reader even parses what the lines say — just from how the type behaves on the page. The typography becomes a second voice running alongside Semenovsky’s text.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF CURATING | book for Hans Ulrich Obrist’s interview collection

book design | typography | contemporary artBrief: «A Brief History of Curating» is a collection of interviews with leading European and American curators from the 1960s–90s, one of the foundational texts on contemporary art. It traces the profession’s shift from museum custodian to «author» of exhibitions, shaping the context of contemporary art. The text itself is dense with names, exhibitions, works and institutions — reading it meant constantly stopping to look things up just to follow who and what was being discussed.Idea: make the book curate itself — apply the same method the text describes to its own layout. Build a color-coding system so the reader can navigate the dense proper-noun text at a glance, and treat image placement as a curatorial act in its own right, governed by one strict module.Solution: five color categories — Personalities (orange), Curatorial Projects (blue), Artworks (green), Publications (yellow), Institutions (pink) — introduced to the reader on the cover itself, before the text even starts. Photos are placed exactly where the text discusses them, in frames that all follow a single 1× module, so no image ever floats free of the argument. Short biographies were added for the author and every curator interviewed (Walter Hopps, Pontus Hultén, Johannes Cladders, Jan Leering, Harald Szeemann, Franz Meyer, Seth Siegelaub, Werner Hofmann, Walter Zanini, Anne d’Harnoncourt, Lucy Lippard), so readers immediately get the speaker’s professional context.Result: a layout that performs curating rather than describing it — the color system and modular image grid turn a name-heavy scholarly text into something navigable, and the book itself becomes a curatorial project about curating.