Ideological conception is always under affection of the plastic one in designer’s work. Creative thinking, the hand, and the eye help the designer find ways that lay beyond the reach of logical perception. However, dull-witted clients, marketing experts and managers only see the designer’s job as a one-way process from brief to result and from content to form. This rough idea is really prevailing in the market of design nowadays. And this is exactly the thing which generates that deadly monotonous commercial design surrounding us.
Peter Bankov, with his “Design Depo” team – one of the most significant Moscow studios–had a hand in the mass production of this kind of tradable product. Product which was, in fact qualified and solid, yet boring. However, four years ago Peter’s artistic nature rebelled and called for immediate discharge into the art of the poster.
The poster is associated with a dying art. Informative functionality has moved from poster to the Internet and digital media. But at the same time, it has released the artistic soul of this genre and given it a boundless freedom. No longer mass media, the poster has become a powerful source of creative energy, strong emotions and pure joy. This brings the poster and art together and makes it clear why Peter Bankov calls his genre “poster-art” and the result of this amazing and strange work – the “poster diary”.
Keeping a diary in the ‘rough tongue of the poster’. Sounds like nonsense, right? Nevertheless, that is exactly what graphic designer Peter Bankov has been doing for the past few years. Despite his extra busy schedule as owner and creative director of Design Depot Studios, and editor-in-chief of the celebrated graphic design magazine [kAk), and living between his two homes in Moscow and Prague, Peter Bankov still manages to make time for such paradoxical creative endeavors. New posters are published on social media almost daily, as visual reflections on personal, professional and public realities and experiences. The posters use a mixture of Cyrillic and Latin characters, of the Russian, Czech and English languages.
In the spirit of the diary genre (and contrary to that of the poster), these works remain semi-cryptic, with many connotations obscure to the wider audience and legible only to members of the inner circle. At the same time, they serve as indelible manifestations, urbi et orbi, of cursory glimpses and minute details of quotidian life. The genre discovered by Peter Bankov is innovative and experimental. The visual language transforms to reflect the changing moods and circumstances, the vocabulary and intonations are in constant flow.
Meanwhile, the author remains true to his signature style, using a blend of graphic effects to create a powerful force field of rich and vibrant texture, which can be edgy and brutal or fluid and ornamental, but is always vigorous and expressive. Through these emerges the eminent personality of the author, who ignites a live and pulsating atmosphere of creative effervescence wherever he goes.
The “Poster Diary” of Peter Bankov is captivating more and more people. Moreover, I believe that this bright artistic gesture and passionate creative experience contributes significantly to graphic design as a whole.