Critical Daily    Critical practice in graphic design

Two years ago I started to doing my research about life and work of Karol Rosmany, important and influential slovak graphic designer. Shortly about his life - he was born in 1937, he studied architecture in Slovak Technical University and got his engineering degree in 1962. However, he was more interested in graphic design, so after 1967 he started to work as full time graphic designer for book publishers. His main orders were book design and logo design. Now, in age of 79, he is on his retirement, but still active.

His most important work was logo and visual identity for political party called Public Against Violence from revolution year 1989. In November 1989 after police attacks to protesting students started a series of big demonstrations to protest against communist regime, leading by new political party Public Against Violence. When Rosmany was participating in one of these demonstrations he find out that there was not any brand sign for this actions, so he decided to make one. After two days he made a serie of predesigns using his hand-writing script. Final result, which was definitively used for political party, was letter V (victory) in slovak tricolor red-blue-white. With its informal visual identity it perfectly fitted into street-based democratic revolution and made political party easily memorable. Logo was used in following big election campaign on numerous series of posters, pamphlets, emblems, etiquettes etc.

This logo certainly had big influence and it became a sign of Velvet revolution and democratic freedom in Slovakia. It’s still actual to present. Nowadays, some public demonstrations also has strong united visual signs (like protests against Gorila or Teacher’s strike). Sometimes, I am trying to imagine these actions without any visual sign – should the protests have same effect? Should people be less coherent without any sign?