Visual Identity
The story of Boris Ljubičić and MDC began in the first half of the 1980s. At the initiative of MDC, he created a proposal for an information column stand with the programs of Zagreb museums, which was exhibited at the Zagreb Salon in 1986. A few years later, his design language became MDC’s trademark. Boris Ljubičić is the designer behind MDC's recognizable logo, and he designed the first visual identity for MDC in 1989. He designed the logo as an acronym in the sans-serif font Helvetica Medium. Like his later works for MDC, this logo was stylized by the context of the time because, broken and scattered like a discovered archaeological monument, it symbolized the coming global and domestic socio-political disintegration. It was planned to first print it on envelopes with a letterhead, and then on other products. On the cover of the journal Informatica Museologica, the logo appeared with volume 3/4 for the year 1988, at the same time when Ljubičić took over the cover design of that journal. The same was the case with the journal Muzeologija, but with a year-later edition (issue 27). On the publication Exhibitions & Events: Museums and Galleries of Zagreb, the logo has been visible since the volume for July – September 1989, when Ljubičić adopted a uniform design for that publication. The same logo can also be seen on the poster for the International Museum Day (IMD) before Ljubičić took over the design of this event in 1991.
Ljubičić designed the second logo for the MDC ten years later. It features the monochromatic letters “MDC” divided by a raster into elements in serif and sans-serif fonts. The arrangement of lines in the raster draws squares, associating them with the design of diagonally placed squares that Ljubičić conceived as a recognizable sign of Croatian identity. In addition to promotional material, the logo was first incorporated into Ljubičić's cover of the journal Informatica Museologica 29 (volume 3/4) from the year 1998, into the cover of Muzeologija 36, the catalogue of the 18th Exhibition of the Publishing Activities of Croatian Museums and Galleries, the first edition of New Arrivals in MDC Library from the year 1999, and into the poster for International Museum Day from the same year. This large-scale logo was also placed on the MDC’s award-winning modular stand at the 2006 Interliber international book fair.
The current MDC logo was created in 2006. Ljubičić used the existing logo as a template, but made it more layered with sans-serif and more serif fonts and a combination of several colors, symbolizing the diversity of MDC's activities. It formed the visual backbone of the minimalist CD covers of Croatian Museums Annual Reports – Zagreb Museum Annual Reports for 2005, 2006, and 2007, where the monochrome background provides a certain counterbalance to the reduction of expression reduced to the visual identity of the MDC. It can be seen on Ljubičić's poster for the IMD from the year 2008, and it also appeared on the journal Muzeologija with issue 46 from the year 2009. It won the platinum (the highest) award at the international Graphis Logo Design 7 competition in New York, and it also had a central place on the MDC's, once again awarded, stand at Interliber in 2008.
Ljubičić also created logos for MDC's anniversaries. For the 50th anniversary of its foundation, he added the letter “L” (Roman numeral 50) and the numbers 1955 and 2005 to the acronym from the 1999 logo, which denote the years of its foundation and anniversary. A decade later, he adapted the 2006 logo for the 60th anniversary by adding the number “60”. For the 70th anniversary in 2025, he designed the logo in five versions, also playing with the acronym in combination with the letters “LXX” (Roman numeral 70). The logo was used as the cover of the anniversary online exhibition, in the animations created for the event, and in other content.
With the logos he designed for MDC, Ljubičić confirmed that good design is not synonymous with complex graphic creations, but it is often a design that manages to attract attention and clearly convey a message to the observer with a simple solution.