Boris Ljubičić – the Trademark of MDC
The collaboration between Boris Ljubičić and the Museum Documentation Centre is one of the longest-lasting, but also one of the most comprehensive engagements in Croatian design. Its central thread is, of course, the posters for International Museum Day. Although over the past four and a half decades they have been designed by a range of designers – including prominent figures such as Boris Bućan, Ivan Picelj, Nada Falout, Nedeljko Dragić, Bruketa & Žinić and Nenad Dogan – this important series has nevertheless remained most strongly identified with Boris Ljubičić. He designed the largest share of the posters, more than half of the current total collection, and the vast majority of the posters created from 1991 until 2017, with only a few exceptions. Taking into account his successive designs and redesigns of the MDC logo itself, as well as his editorial design work – above all the journals Muzeologija and Informatica Museologica – this collaboration is even more extensive, reaching back to the late 1980s and the first logo, while its prehistory extends even further. Ljubičić’s three logos for the MDC are not his best-known works in this medium, but they demonstrate just as convincingly his ability to synthesise clearly readable meanings by combining simple elements arranged in unexpected, inventive relationships. In the initial logo, the modernist Helvetica typeface was deconstructed so that fragments of the initials “MDC” resembled architectural remnants of some bygone era. Because the “detached” pieces of the letters appeared in different positions in practical applications (in journals, posters, brochures, etc.), the logo also evoked a puzzle – and, by extension, the role of museums in assembling material fragments into complete stories of the cultures from which those fragments originated.
The new design that followed in 2000 was once again a play with typography, but this time one that was more universal in meaning, more inclusive, and much more appropriate for the increasingly broad definitions of museums and their roles in the new millennium. This time Ljubičić condensed the very idea of the museum into a synthesis of past and present, heritage and contemporaneity, symbolised by the joining of serif and sans-serif typefaces, incorporated into a rectangular grid that subtly introduces a national code, distinctive for Ljubičić (in institutional contexts). When he redesigned this logo six years later, he retained the basic idea but brought it into step with the dynamic world of the web and motion graphics. Even these lesser-known examples speak of Ljubičić’s ability to construct complex meanings with minimal visual means, as well as his stubborn determination to find an opportunity for innovation in every project.
For Ljubičić, the logo and the visual mark are absolutely central elements of graphic design, something demonstrated in practice by the fact that these are precisely the areas with which he has worked the most – he has designed more than 250 of them, and most have been or still are in use. However, the most recognisable part of his engagement with the MDC consists of the posters for International Museum Day. And more than that: within the context of Ljubičić’s design oeuvre, some of these posters rank among his most important works altogether. This is no small claim considering his enormous output, which over more than 50 years has touched almost every area of communication design – from poster and book design, through packaging, to the visual identities of many of the most recognisable Croatian institutions, companies and brands. Moreover, I would argue that Ljubičić’s engagement with the MDC itself authentically portrays his design worldview, his creative approach, and some of the key moments in his career.
His very first poster for International Museum Day, published in the spring of 1991, demonstrates this in a whole range of ways. It perfectly represents Ljubičić as a designer of grand conceptual statements – something that had surfaced occasionally in his work as early as the 1970s (for example, the posters for the 7th Zagreb Salon, the Drava matchbox packaging, and, in a certain sense, MIS ’79), but only in the 1990s became almost a standard feature of his production. It was actually in the 1990s and 2000s that Ljubičić’s design acquired an ambition to enlighten and provoke thought, where almost every major project became an opportunity to visually articulate some commentary on the state of the world, the significance of a particular moment in time, or the power and importance of design. Following major projects, such as the Mediterranean Games in Split in 1979, YASSA, the Music Biennale Zagreb, Eurosong, and the redesigns of Labud, Franck and other companies, Ljubičić seemed unstoppable by the end of the 1980s, and the polemical intellectual charge of his design remained unwavering.
Such persistence, combined with the strongly conceptual nature of his design, enabled Ljubičić to successfully navigate the 1990s – a decade that swept away entire generations of older designers, both because of the collapse or decline of many previously thriving contexts for design (clients, factories, publishing facilities, etc.), and because of the flood of amateurism brought about by the first wave of digitalisation of the design process. Ljubičić’s resilience and fighting spirit were likely also fuelled by his first major disappointments, primarily those surrounding his advocacy for a comprehensive visual identity of the state. All of this was merely a tiny echo of the shock caused by the global political and social changes that Ljubičić’s first International Museum Day poster, also known by the unofficial title A Jug Goes to the Well Until It Breaks, captures with remarkable precision. A few months earlier, the Berlin Wall had fallen; a few months later, the Soviet Union would dissolve; the Cold War had ended; and just one month afterwards, Slovenia and Croatia would declare independence. Few posters in the history of design represent the inevitability and irreversibility of time as powerfully as this one, with its photograph of fragments of a clay jug and water spilled from it. The fragments, however, have been skilfully rearranged into the shapes of continents, clearly suggesting an optimistic outcome as well – a new world, created from the fragments of the old.
The series that followed until 2017, although consisting of commissioned works for a serious institutional client, most closely resembles Ljubičić’s increasingly frequent self-initiated works – those created as a means of expressing his own position or responding to the current moment. It is important to note the breadth and seriousness of the associations these posters evoke. They consistently touch upon themes of time, museums, heritage, the relationship between past and present, and so on, but they very rarely concern themselves with the specific themes assigned by ICOM for each individual year. The merging of two heads in the 1992 poster – the ancient sculpture of the The Woman from Salona and a skull from the Natural History Museum, brought together in a masterful trick photograph by Željko Stojanović – has no obvious connection with the theme Museums and the Environment. But instead, it functions as a lucid visual essay on the relationship between art and life, or rather between cultural heritage and the long-lost reality upon which that heritage was built. In other words, that poster is a statement about how the person whose face is preserved in this ancient sculpture, whoever she may have been, was once a real, living person just like you or me. Of course, because of the circumstances of war at the time, the poster also easily invited other readings, in which the skull symbolised not only death but also aggression and the destruction caused by war.
Besides photographers such as Damir Fabijanić (for A Jug Goes to the Well…) and Željko Stojanović “Žika”, Ljubičić also brought other frequent collaborators into the creation of the International Museum Day posters, such as his son Igor Ljubičić, who in the 1990s specialised in the then cutting-edge field of 3D graphics. His abilities in this area are best demonstrated by the 1994 poster. That poster is one of the rare examples that responds clearly to ICOM’s theme, even radicalising it by portraying what happens “behind the museum scene” through the quiet and valuable work of an ant colony – otherwise not exactly welcome guests in any museum collection. Another such example, even more direct, is the poster Collecting Today for Tomorrow. Here, Ljubičić noticed the remarkable coincidence that the Croatian phrase “danas za sutra” (today for tomorrow) contains exactly 12 letters, the same number as the digits on an analogue clock, and built one of his most focused poster designs around that fact. The entire series reached its second peak (after its brilliant beginning in 1991) in the year 2000 with the three-dimensional poster unofficially known as Love Square & Circle. Through a process inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s tabula scalata, it unites two abstract forms – the square and the circle – in an interactive play with the viewer. Despite its abstract and enigmatic form, this poster, like many of Ljubičić’s works, communicates a great deal. It is both about the encounter between Western and Eastern cultures (symbolised by the square and the circle), and about the fact that a poster does not exist without the viewer, without their movement and their ability to perceive each thing from multiple angles. Ljubičić wouldn’t lose momentum in the posters that followed, each time offering a new visual statement. Thus, in 2004, he speaks not only about the importance of intangible heritage (such as the Sinjska Alka, symbolised by the metal ring), but also about the status of ubiquitous contemporary design (evoked through the juxtaposition of the Mercedes emblem) as equal alongside any other cultural artefact.
It is worth turning attention here to Ljubičić’s editorial design work – above all the covers and back covers – for the journals Informatica Museologica and Muzeologija, which he approached just as if he were designing posters. The covers of Informatica Museologica are often variations of the same visuals used on the International Museum Day posters, while the covers of Muzeologija appear almost like an extension of this poster series, simply in a smaller format. The fact that these are specialist journals gives Ljubičić considerable creative freedom – their covers contain no large headlines or subtitles, no highlighted content, leads, or similar editorial elements. The only mandatory elements are the masthead with the logo and basic numerical information, while the rest of the surface of the cover becomes a canvas for the designer’s ideas and visual associations, which are very often inventive, witty, and surprising. This is especially true when an unexpected turn occurs between the front and back cover, a continuation of the “story” that would not have been possible on a poster.
Design itself is not a fixed or unambiguous concept; like everything else, it is in constant transformation. Thus, Ljubičić’s first posters were created at a time when the poster as a medium possessed a propagandistic power and a ubiquity in public space that it no longer has today. However, as a communication artefact, the poster is still probably the best way to understand how design functions, as well as how we interact with the world around us, and with the people and stories that make up our shared reality. The posters of Boris Ljubičić that we see here are not merely reflections of that reality, nor merely interpretations of reality, but its creation – from the fragments of old images, the shining new images of our time.