Russian Design
The Modern Russian Design (or новый русский дизайн) is about graphic design in Russia. Cyrillic letters and symbols in creative forms, from the last 20 years. Beautiful works and entertaining stories, by colorful designers.
Documentary by Sergey Shanovich (Сергей Шанович), Shandesign. Russian spoken, English subtitled, 53 min, from 2016. Short introduction here.
100 Years of Design
Twenty designers and design collectives (RU) discuss the (international) design that has influenced them. Yury Gordon, Denis Bashev, Maxi Shilov, Stas Aki, Oleg Pashenko, Anton Schnaider (and others) on Bauhaus, Times New Roman, Alvar Aalto, propaganda, Le Corbusier, Playboy, Porsche, Windows, and more.
Онлайн-школа дизайна/ Bang Bang Education, 2019, 106 min. From the same channel, check out these 33 words about design in Russia (2019, 1 min).
Watch 100 Years of Design (trailer below) on YouTube.
See also The Modern Russian Design (2013, 3 min).
For more on (Russian) typography, see the Guide to Russian Typography. In two parts: Deciphering Cyrillic (2017, 4 min) and Russian Orthography (2017, 5 min).
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Country
The Netherlands holds a unique place in the Russian imagination. This is how our country, and we, are viewed through Russian eyes.
An interview becomes legendary when it gets its own page on
Wikipedia. On February 6, 2024, Tucker Carlson spoke with Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin. The report (127 minutes) offers a good, or at least broad, opportunity to hear the Russian perspective on the war against Ukraine.
What we would call ’tokkies’ or ‘gabbers’, and what elsewhere might be referred to as white trash or hooligans – in Russia, these are called gopniki. Folk culture in a tracksuit.
Since the age of sixteen, Игорь Мухин (1961) has been taking photographs. Armed with a
Смена-8М camera, he started his journey. So, when he found himself among artists and musicians in the 1980s, he already had a trained eye – and a better camera. Mukhin (sometimes Moukhin) witnessed major changes and began documenting them.
Freedom of speech is decreasing everywhere, though the reasons vary by region. Meanwhile, Big Tech’s power is growing, along with its interference. In this new era, a nearly forgotten Soviet answer is reemerging: samizdat, the underground DIY press and distribution network.
Every country has a flag and a coat of arms. The Netherlands has a lion, France has a rooster, New Zealand has a kiwi, and the United States has a bald eagle. In Russia, it’s an eagle with two heads and three crowns, and a man on a horse who has just killed a dragon with a spear.
