ZNAK. Trademarks in Ukraine from 1910 to 2019. Archives reactivated.

ZNAK (trademark in Ukrainian) is a cataloguing and contextualisation of a scattered archive of Ukrainian corporate logotypes from the 1910s-1920s to the 2000s. A period that includes the time when Ukraine was one of the socialist republics of the Soviet Empire and when the profession and disciplines of corporate design were being developed. These archives, including those of the Kharkiv Chamber of Commerce and Industry in charge of distributing orders to graphic designers, suffered irreversible damage with the collapse of the USSR. With this episode, knowledge about graphic processes was also lost. The documentary approach, implemented between 2015 and 2019, by the collective U,N,A -three Ukrainian graphic designers- who carried out this work is also a research on the continuity of Ukrainian culture and a basis for work for female practitioners. With the war “declared” by the Russian Federation on Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the editorial and scientific board of Problemata's researchers proposed to U,N,A to editorialize their research on the eponymous platform of dissemination of design research. The aim is to relay a work that constitutes or could constitute in the future the basis of a reflection on the permeability of strategies of domination within the framework of intra-European relations and to support the three designers who carried it out. Direction of the line: U,N,A Collective (Uliana Bychenkova, Nika Kudinova and Aliona Solomadina). This line received special support from Ensad-Nancy. 🇺🇦 #ScienceForUkraine