Publications
Boris Ljubičić's collaboration on the design of publications published by MDC has lasted from the last third of the 1980s to the present. He has created more than a hundred solutions that have “wrapped” magazines, programs, catalogs, collections and other publications. His covers often illustrate what is inside them, i.e. the visuals on the cover and back are an intelligent interpretation of the issue's theme, and sometimes a commentary on current events in Croatian and world culture, society, and politics.
The design of the quarterly program Exhibitions & Events: Museums and Galleries of Zagreb is his oldest work for MDC in this category, with the first publication published in 1987 and the last in 1991. The motifs on the covers of the first ten issues differ and are often associative in relation to the seasons they cover, so one spring issue is adorned with blades of grass, and the autumn issue with raindrops. In later issues, he introduces a unique design, but with a different background color.
Ljubičić designed the covers of the journal Informatica Museologica from 1988 to 2000. The design corresponds to the theme of the issue and fits in even when solutions from posters for the International Museum Day (IMD) are used or motifs are somewhat “recycled” from some other posters – for example, the yellow-white three-dimensional letters from the covers of his two issues from 1989 are reminiscent of those from the posters for the Dubrovnik Summer Festival from 1985. Details from the IMD posters also appear in the proceedings of international symposia from 2001 and 2006. The book of abstracts of the symposium Music in a Museum / Museums of Music, the accompanying poster from 2013, and the journal Muzeologija 51 from 2014 with the same theme show an auricle composed like a mosaic of pictures with parts of a stringed instrument. In his search for a perfect example of this part of the human anatomy, which also resembles a violin and related instruments with its lines, Ljubičić had previously researched this motif and published it on a poster for the 11th Zagreb Music Biennale in 1981. In the aforementioned book of abstracts, the front and back sides complement each other so that, when we place the back of one copy against the front of the other, we get a complete image of the auricle.
His posters also took their place in several issues of the catalogue Exhibition of Publishing Activities of Croatian Museums and Galleries, on which he worked intermittently from 1996 to 2016. However, in the first five issues of that publication, the motif of a cube and a picture frame touching each other is repeated, with a change in the coloration of the composition. An even better example of his design leitmotif can be found in the publication New Arrivals in MDC Library from 1999 to 2010. There, the drawing of the spines of casually folded books is repeated almost like a mise en abyme, but the color and patterns differ from issue to issue, making each one unique.
Creative and ingenious design can also be seen in the journal Muzeologija, Ljubičić's longest-running collaboration with MDC, from 1989 to the present. The image reflects the theme of the issue, but also the context of the time in which it was published. Such is the case, for example, with issue 57 from the pandemic year 2020, on the cover and back of which are photographs of a classical portrait sculpture The Woman from Salona with a piece of cloth over her eyes, reminiscent of the then current protective mask for the nose and mouth, and one of these photographs had previously been published on the back of the journal Muzeologija 40 from the year 2003. A year later, he illustrated the topic of earthquakes in museums with a black-and-white photograph of fragments of a broken classical column. In the journal Muzeologija, almost as a rule he uses original solutions. One exception is the cover of Muzeologija 56 from 2019, featuring an outline of Meštrović’s 1928 sculpture Waiting, recursively constructed like a mosaic of small photographs of his numerous sculptures, including the sculpture itself. This work was previously seen on Ljubičić’s 2003 poster for the 120th anniversary of Ivan Meštrović’s birth. He also used photographs of Meštrović’s sculptures on the cover of issue 36, twenty years earlier. The letter “M” with the raster from the MDC logo stretches across most of the cover, decorated with the aforementioned photographs. It simultaneously refers to the publisher, the title of the publication, and the theme of the issue, which dealt with Meštrović’s works in collections. In issue 48/49 from 2012, he visually played with the theme of electronic books by arranging physical books in the shape of the “@” sign. The computer graphics were done by his son Igor Ljubičić, who has been working in his father's company Studio International since the first half of the 1990s.
The covers of the four publications in the series How to Publish a Good Museum Book also feature imaginative solutions. For example, the covers of Publications for People with Disabilities feature Ljubičić's colorful fingerprints, alluding simultaneuously to the blind and partially sighted people, the uniqueness of the individual, and leaving behind the author's tactile signature. The cover of the 1998 Guide of Zagreb and Its Environs: Museums, Galleries, Collections, published in both English and German, was illustrated with the outlines of some of Zagreb's symbols – the equestrian sculpture of King Tomislav, the cathedral and the dome of the Art Pavilion. For the MDC's travelling exhibition 20 Posters of the Museum Documentation Centre 1980 – 2000, he created several catalogues for different venues. They are visually quite simple, almost minimalist and achromatic. The exception is the 2003 edition from Pula, whose cover features a mosaic of poster clippings created on the occasion of International Museum Day over the course of more than two decades.
The richest part of Ljubičić's oeuvre for the MDC is certainly his publications. They clearly trace Ljubičić's development of design expression and reveal his ingenious authorial style. The covers of many of them are a visual synthesis of the texts they enclose. Although original solutions are the most interesting, self-referencing gives new life to his visual and typographic elements, and to the wholes composed of them.