designed by Zuzana Kostelanská and Oriol Cabarrocas and inspired by the logos, designed by the artists of the Tara bureau
The book was designed as an experiment in graphic design, introducing a playful way of getting to know the Tara bureau’s samples through thematic ABC chapters and Glossary navigation. Throughout the book, the Glossary keywords are marked like stamps on packaging, thus allowing to navigate between Then and Now, between Here and There, providing a slightly more contextual introduction to the period of the Tara bureau, and the intentions and practices of its artists. When creating the Glossary, we searched for reflections of identity, signs of time, and other codes of meaning. The attempts to explore fragmented surviving examples from a contemporary perspective involved recreating a small segment at a time, investigating the biographies of individual artists or fragments of individual works by using the essential zoom-in method. The incompleteness of the Glossary also reflects the fragmentary nature of the Tara bureau’s archive, encoded in its very identity.
The Glossary was inspired by the logos, designed by the artists of the Tara bureau. It was the idea proposed by Deimantė Jasiulevičiūtė and Zuzana Kostelanská. It started with their focus on logos that felt more alive, each having its own voice and identity – like an A resembling a flame or a growing flower, and a Z resembling a snake, a symbol often seen in Lithuanian mythology. This process led to search for additional letter variations, eventually discovering almost the entire alphabet, which is how the idea of creating a glossary was born.
Photos by Karolis Milaševičius
