Interview with Pavel Borisovsky
«System is the 'god of design'».
Designer, graphic artist.
He graduated from the Moscow State Art College in Memory of 1905 and the Moscow State Academy of Printing. He is the founder of the design studio «Sluzhba peyzazha"(Landscape Service) and the publisher of the magazine «Predmet"(Subject). He is also the creator of the art organization «Global Cultural Project». He is a member of the Moscow Union of Artists and the Union of Designers of Russia.
Corporate identity for the organization Global Cultural Project
Design Archive: How can I best explain what design is to someone who has not thought about it or understands it?
Pavel Borisovsky: Design is like a faucet that has red and blue markings to distinguish between hot and cold water. It’s also like a form of communication, a manifesto that can be expressed through the medium of rock music in the 1960s. Design is a unique language that allows us to think, express ourselves, and communicate with others in order to make the world a better place.
Logos of different years
DA: «What is good and what is bad» in modern (graphic) design?
PB: It’s good when it’s accurate, it’s bad when it’s mannered, confusing. It’s good when it’s unexpected, in a new way. It’s bad when it’s boring in the canons of design, as it should be.
Corporate booklet of ALROSA diamonds of Russia
DA: What is the most fascinating thing about design — from the point of view of the process itself, practice? What do you like to do most in design?
PB: Probably, people need to work in a complex when space is changing, business is working, a combination of interior and graphic design, when you feel that you are changing the world.
Corporate identity for ISCON
DA: Even a poorly designed flag can mean more than a perfectly arranged colored rectangle with no clear function. A logo with a bitten apple would be meaningless if it weren’t for the company behind it. Design can certainly evoke emotions, but can it create meaning on its own?
PB: The example of a bitten apple is a classic illustration of how design (in this case, industrial design) can create a lot and change civilization. The apple represents approximately the same thing as a flag — beyond these borders lies a wonderful territory with amazing opportunities.
Corporate identity for «Delis Archive»
DA: How does design thinking differ from artistic thinking? Obviously, neither good taste nor technical skill is enough to create great art. Art creates something else. And what creates a good design?
PB: The ability to think systematically, approach the project. The system is the «god of design». In fact, everything has been invented in semiotics for a long time — semantics, syntactics and pragmatics. Art is a vertical connection between creators. Design is based mainly on horizontal connections, design does not happen not for people, but art does. Sometimes the viewer is just a happy witness, spying on the creator. And design is about our earthly life. How can we arrange, how can we be and live better.
«Pravila"(Rules), photo essay
DA: What is the design statement? Who is it addressed to in the first place?
PB: It happens differently, this design, and is addressed to very different people, but there are, of course, «shop diseases» when you do and think about colleagues, what they will say. This is workshop communication, which, by the way, artists have always had. You can read, for example, the memoirs of Durer and other «artisans».
Booklet for Tom Stoppard’s play Rock’n'roll by the RAMT Theater
DA: What is the source of design and culture in general for you, where do some important impulses always come from?
PB: The fact that «big» happens every day is important. I was very inspired to work with our magazine («Predmet») for this very reason. There was a feeling that people with different hobbies were engaged in creativity, you were doing something in parallel, and this was such a big global factory. Hence the idea of GCP, a global cultural project. The point was that we asked people a question, people decided for themselves, how do they think they are participating in a global cultural project? And, as it were, they became members of the world’s «club of creators.»
Booklet for the play «The Fate of Electra» by the RAMT theater
«… design is about our everyday life. How can we organize, how can we live and be better?»