Independent Culture is More Important to Us than Money!
Last week we reported that three young Croatian designers, Rafaela Dražić, Dario Dević and Hrvoje Živčić, were short listed among twenty most powerful young visual artists according to Print magazine. We promised you a more up close and personal view of these talented young New Visual Artists, so today we present an interview with the creative duo Dević/Živčić.
Hrvoje and Dario completed their graduate studies in 2010 at the School of Design within the Zagreb Faculty of Architecture, often working on various projects throughout their studies and later, upon completing them. They’re both free-lance designers and mostly take on jobs tied to independent culture. They count a series of awards at the Magdalena – the International Festival of Creative Communications, which we covered here as well as the 0910 Croatian Design Exhibition (click here for more on the awards).
A lot of people had the chance to meet this creative duo at the Spring Pecha Kucha, the sixth edition of the Zagreb Pecha Kucha Night held in front of the Jedinstvo Hall, whose billboard was created precisely by Dario and Hrvoje.
You can click on their respective websites to view more information on their work and awards (dario-dario-dario.com and hrvojezivcic.com), while read on to find out their opinions and viewpoints on the aforementioned recognition, career plans and the future. We also present you with a selection of their most interesting works.
For starters, what does this award mean to you?
It’s great to see our works on Print’s pages, especially as they’re smaller works, with smaller circulation, for a select target audience… Now these “small” works will reach a large audience. Of course a dose of publicity is now involved what can only benefit us as young up-and-coming designers.
What’s the NVA selection based on and what, in your opinion, set you apart so you made the list?
The NVA selection procedure is organized so that already established professional designers recommend young visual artists to the magazine’s editorial board. A professional panel of judges, which this year included Michael Worthington and Yasmin Khan from Counterspace, short listed that nominated circle to 20. This year the winners were sorted in subcategories for the first time: thus Rafaela Dražić was included in the postformalists who challenge and move the boundaries of design, while we were listed among the critically inclined practice who search for new approaches and expressions within the field of graphic design.
*This’n’That – The SC has a specific audience: the young wanting for culture, but also the gang that spend their days in cafeteria, hipsters from the &TD café, park skaters and drunk teenagers near the French Pavilion. They all know that something is going on here so once in a while they’ll step into the theater or gallery, but what’s most attractive to them in the SC is the well-known ‘this’n’that’ atmosphere.
Who’s to blame for the fact that the general public, as well as the profession itself don’t take international awards and recognitions seriously enough?
Not only in design but in other areas as well, a strong “award culture” has been developing lately so it’s not unusual that awards in general are starting to lose value in the general public’s eye. However, such specific awards are more important within the profession itself, where people can appraise the worth of any given award.
You’re perceived as a team and you’re listed on Print’s list as a duo, while on the other hand you have separate websites. How does that work? As a team effort or individuals that complement each other?
Back in school, along with individual works, we started working on joint ones as well, and that approach has worked for us to this day. We see ourselves as two designers who work together, today even more so than before as we’ve recently started working with several colleagues in a shared space. We also have different sensitivity levels, so it’s always interesting to watch to what will prevail in any given work, and even when it’s a 50-50 split, the end result comes out unexpected even to us.
*Čemu (What For?) – Philosophy students’ magazine, the magazine’s design and layout logo (Hrvoje)
A lot of your work is connected with independent culture, often related to pro bono work. Is money even important in such scenarios? Do 24-year-old designers make any money and can one live off design in Croatia?
The budgets of the projects we work on are often small, but we take them on anyway – not only because working for independent culture brings about a certain amount of freedom but because these are things which we feel close to and a connection with. We’re frequent visitors of concerts and plays at the SC and &TD, we read Zarez (“The Comma” – a renowned Croatian cultural and social biweekly), we go to the Močvara… It’s fun to design for them as we’re designing for an audience we can relate to. As far as money is concerned, we studied design, we work within that field, and of course we’d like to be able to make a living from it. I guess the trick is to find a balance between that which you want to do and that what is somewhat more lucrative.
What would you recommend to an eighteen-year-old who is preparing to go to design school?
Even though there was some criticism at the design school’s expense a few years back, it seems to us that during the past five years things there have shifted for the better. It’s not ideal, but then again what is, so our advice would be: you need to listen and see what they’re offering and choose what suits you best.
*This Project Is Shit – an action plan formulated within the context of a graduation thesis on the topic of user formed content (Dario)
In today’s world, to what extent are the Internet, networking and social networks important for the success of an artist, especially a designer? Can Facebook get you a job?
We’re not sure if Facebook ever helped us get a job, but it has made a lot of stuff more practical and quicker. It’s made it easy to be available and visible as well as to see what others are doing.
Do you believe your work stands apart from Croatia’s newer designer expression? Could that be the reason you’re on the NVA list?
Do we stand out? Well, it seems to us that among other young, experimental designers who often step out of the design box and mix it up with stage design and performance or even activism and personal engagement, we stand out the least. In addition, young designers in Croatia are, relatively speaking, a highly diverse group, so it’s not like there’s any one specific dominant style within the field of graphic design from which one can stand apart from.
*Themselves Already Hop! – a play that was performed at the &TD Theater all of one night, so we didn’t get the chance to see it ― so we decided for complete distancing from content interpretation. We only put photo material we got from the theater troup on the billboard, and included the content afterwards with the help of info-postcards. When the passers-by and audience take them off, all that’s left is a clean and empty photo-billboard.
Do you have any postgraduate plans in the works or are you staying in Croatia for now?
We don’t plan ahead. However, although there are some tentative plans to continue our studies abroad, but for now we’re staying put in Zagreb.
Print singled you out as the up-and-coming new visual artists, and we’re interested in whom you would single out? Are there any artists, designers, projects and websites we should especially pay attention to?
We follow tons of tumblrs, blogs, sites and we stumble upon at least a 1000 new designers, artists and projects daily. We recently stumbled upon excellent pop-culture lettering illustrations of Marko Purać from Serbia, we think Travis Coburn’s retro illustrations are great as well as Joost Grootens’ meticulously put together books, while the site we obsessively refresh all the time in search of new works is urtd.net , run by type and graphic designer Ondrej Jób from Slovakia. Be sure to check it out!
*Decadance – Identity, posters and flyers for dirty pop evenings in the Grič movie theater
*&TD flyers – new edition of program flyers for the &TD Theater, season 2010/2011
*Liquid knowledge – The Culture of Change’s project in view of recording certain lectures and entire courses at the Zagreb University and creating an online archive of the same, available to all
*Laštik – The logo for a fashion/accessories group from Zagreb. The colors are generated accidentally so the logo looks different every time
