Ivan Vasin & Ivan Velichko

Ivan Vasin &
Ivan Velichko

Creative Directors, Partners

Shuka Design

Moscow, Russia

Ivan Vasin is a Creative Director, Partner and Co-founder of Shuka, a Moscow-based design studio. He also teaches classes at the British Higher School of Art and Design.

Ivan studied at the Moscow State University of Printing Arts (graduated in 2006), while working as a designer at a number of publications, mostly youth magazines. After graduation, he spent 4 years working in the position of a designer at Kommersant, Russia's leading publishing house.

His professional focus had lain in designing multi-page publications (newspapers, magazines, books)—complex creations, structured and arranged on paper—until the periodicals industry lost its relevance.

For the last several years, Ivan has been leading projects as an art director and digital product manager at Shuka. In his work, he now studies the connection between content and user experience through interface design.

Ivan believes his editorial experience has contributed to Shuka's original approach to branding and visual identity design, that is based on criticism and journalism ethics.

Ivan Velichko is a Creative Director and Co-founder of Shuka, a Moscow-based design studio. Ivan has a Doctor degree in art history. He also teaches classes at the British Higher School of Art and Design.

Ivan studied design at the Moscow State University of Printing Arts, graduating in 2006. Four years later, he defended a doctoral thesis on the Polish poster design in the 1960s. Polish posters are known for their use of visual metaphors and artistic gestures, precise messages, and symbols and signs. This is where design meets poetry, and that’s what Ivan pursues in his work.

Having been involved in commercial illustration for magazines, Ivan has brought a form of visual storytelling into Shuka’s projects—design often develops through the use of illustration. Ironic illustrations, with narrative and expressive power, have become a trademark element of Shuka’s design.

As an art director at Shuka, Ivan was in charge of the Prime Russian Magazine (PRM) project for three years. PRM is a major publication dedicated to culture and philosophy, and Ivan’s work included a dozen of assignments for editorial illustrations, commissioned from the leading artists. Ivan believes his experience has contributed to Shuka’s original approach to branding and visual identity design, that is based on criticism and journalism ethics.

Politics and poetry meet in poster format—on the cover of a magazine, in a popular meme, or on an actual poster. A piece of text and an image, put together, can deliver a clear message—an astonishing feat indeed. It’s what makes graphic design such a powerful tool.

ONLINE

shuka.design

ON TWITTER

@shukadesign

ON INSTAGRAM

@shukagram

TALK TOPIC

Sex, Chess & Horse Riding. In search of meaningful signs.
We are going to tell a story about a famous Russian hat and the importance of random events.

We’ll share our method of creating zones of tension inside branding.

We will look at:

- how a sign becomes a meme;
- what to do with the fact that “everything has already been invented”;
- allusions and references: synthesizing a sign from a set of images that are part of popular culture.