International festival Design Week in Kyiv for the first time

15.09.2023

Oksana Khmeliovska

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Kyiv is hosting its inaugural Design Week festival this week. Design Week is considered to be the largest and most respected event in the sphere of design. Because of the full-scale invasion a fully-fledged festival can’t be held in Kyiv, and some of the planned events will be a part of Zurich Design Weeks in Zurich.

An integral part of Kyiv Design Week was the Kyiv Posters initiative. This comprises a series of posters, designed specifically for the event by Ukrainian designers and illustrators. “We strived to show how cool our people are, and to use their (visual) voices to tell the audience in Zurich about Kyiv, who probably don’t know much about the city. There was one more idea: if some font is used in the poster, it should be specified who its author is. It’s evident, for instance, that Oleksiy Chekal is behind the Kyiv Design Week logo. And yes, he actually made it!” said Olga Protasova, project curator.

Protasova added: “Diplomacy is our mission, and we strive to speak as loudly as possible about Ukrainian design and designers. We are persistent, we will not stop,” said Olga Protasova in her exclusive comment to Chytomo.

The collection of posters will be shown in Zurich in the Museum für Gestaltung between Sept. 12-19, and in Mac Paw Space in Kyiv on Sept. 14-15. Kyiv Design Week takes place between Aug. 31 and Sept. 19.

Kyiv Design Week takes place under the TIPSTER project: “Trade, Intellectual Properties Support, and Technical Regulation.” It’s implemented by the NGO “Foundation for Support of Reforms in Ukraine” with the financial support of the German government within the framework of the international cooperation project ReACT4UA (“Application and Implementation of the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement in the field of trade”), implemented by the German federal company Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ). The project is aimed at increasing the competitiveness and sustainability of Ukrainian small and medium-sized enterprises, especially in view of EU accession. The partner of Kyiv Design Week is the USAID Competitive Economy Program.

Image: instagram.com/kyivdesignweek, facebook.com/olyaprotasova