Fiodor SUMKIN

Typography, Opera78, Ecopera, Fiodor Sumkin

I was born in the Soviet Union, and at “visual” point of view my childhood was very monotonous and boring-dull: everybody were was wearing the same clothes and all cars were looking like tanks... In general, everything around me was gray or black and white... The first time I've seen a Mercedes was when I was 12. It was in 1990, the great time of Perestroika had come to our small provincial town. We made some nice exchange of our valuables... We changed Cosmos and Yuri Gagarin, Olympic Mishka and Matreshka to Americans cigarettes, Mc'Do and beer in tin cans. Sure, now I understand that it was not an pretty equal exchange... (Ask any teenager what he prefers more -- a lecture about Lenin, or Sneackers and a Sony Play-Station.) At that time, the imported overseas cigarette packages and bear cans seemed to be a miracle for me. Together with my school friends we were collecting whole collections of different boxes and cans. I had the largest collection of cigarette packages, because my house was near a hotel for foreigners, so every evening I was rummaging the rubbish. However a few years later my parents had started to go to Poland and brought some fashion magazines from … in my point of view from another planet.
At the age of 19 I won a tender for a magazine design and they suggested me a position of art-director. Probably it happened thanks to cigarettes packages and beer cans. By the way on that time I already had an experience in graphical software because at the age of 16, I left a school for working in a small design studio.
Thus, Mr. Gorbachev, Perestroika, and the Berlin Wall were closely interlinked with the graphic design in my life. <...>
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