Meet Mikhail Lychkovskiy

We were lucky to catch up with Mikhail Lychkovskiy recently and have shared our conversation below.

Mikhail, thank you so much for taking the time to share your lessons learned with us and we’re sure your wisdom will help many. So, one question that comes up often and that we’re hoping you can shed some light on is keeping creativity alive over long stretches – how do you keep your creativity alive?

I think the best way to keep creativity alive is to feel in love with what you’re doing. To maintain it, it is enough just to meet the wonderful works of other designers every day in any possible environment.

When we talk about poster design, the best environment for such works is the city itself, poster boards near theaters, museums, posters at transport stops. Of course, sometimes the urban environment does not offer the best examples of graphic design, but we must give it a chance, because somewhere nearby there may be a hidden treasure.

There are also countless design festivals, annual, biennial, triennial poster events. Such events provide a huge amount of material for analysis and inspiration, reflect the state of graphic design at the current time, and I would especially mention Chaumont Design Biennial, Toyama Poster Triennial, Golden Bee Biennial, the United States International Poster Biennial (USIPB), 100 Best Posters and the International Poster Competition (INTL).

For sure, it is better to attend events live in order to get the most impressions, but if this is not possible, then materials can often be found on the Internet. I was once very impressed when I found a video by Seryozha Rasskazov with an overview of the works of the 100 Best Posters #20 festival (Switzerland, Germany, Austria), where he talked not only about the composition, but also about the printing features of each work.

And if we have reached the Internet, then you can easily get a daily dose of inspiration from Instagram channels: typosters, typographicposters, anoghergraphicdotorg, contemporarytype, helveticaposter, certainmagazine, grvphicworld, etc, — we have a plenty of design platforms who carefully collect awesome pieces for our pleasure.

Well, and the books, real books. You can easily get inspired to keep your creativity alive by books of Victionary, Slanted, Niggli, and other nice publishers who make books about graphic design.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

First of all I’m a graphic designer & poster artist. I am in love with fonts and font compositions, I like that with the help of typography you can convey not only information in the sense of text, but also give the information a suitable mood, put a special meaning by influencing typography. And this is especially exciting when at the beginning of the work you do not know if you will succeed and what the result will be. It is said that this very uncertainty characterizes the process as creative.

My last typographic poster was made for the PosterTerritory’s ”Seeding the City Internatonal Poster Show” which is held from November the 4th till December the 13th 2024 at the College of San Mateo, CA, so probably someone will have time to attend this event if the article is published before it closes.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

#1

Time-management and planning are absolutely impactful in the creative journey. The ability to divide a task into pieces and to complete it — the entire surface above my workplace is covered with stickers with tasks and deadlines (the task to write this text is among these stickers until I finish it). Talent is nothing if you can’t finish the job.

#2

Learning capability. To create something new, it is necessary to keep knowledge up to date. Therefore, you will constantly have to study: from books, at workshops, by making your own researches. I attend several poster workshops by Peter Bankov per year, among with making researches and visiting other designers events.

#3

Sense of humor and self-irony. If you take everything too seriously, you will burn out quickly: the high-tempo work, the excitement of receiving awards, impostor syndrome, the excitement of non-receiving awards, constant self-examination and self-limitations will bring you to complete exhaustion. Don’t be too serious, otherwise you’ll die young.

As we end our chat, is there a book you can leave people with that’s been meaningful to you and your development?

“The Design of Everyday Things” by Don Norman. I read it at the very beginning of my passion for design, and was completely delighted with how simply and clearly it tells about the reasons why things are the way we used to see them. The most valuable conclusion for me was that anyone can be the author of the reality around them: physical objects, illustrations, houses, cars, processes. You begin to believe again that knowledge and work can make this world a better place, and that you also contribute to the common cause.

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Image Credits

Profile photo by Sasha Knox (https://www.instagram.com/s_knox_photo/)

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