Victor Tyapkov — Jazz Days
artist
Victor Tyapkov
Victor Tyapkov spends his working days doing two things that shouldn’t share a desk: drawing maps precise enough for a history museum, and making posters loose enough to swing. His long-running series for Jazz Days, an international jazz festival, has quietly become part of the festival’s own identity — type that swings, colour that behaves like a rhythm section — and a companion series for a regional blues festival works the same instinct in a rawer key.
The map-making is serious work: exhibition graphics and maps for the GULAG History Museum are his most-viewed project on Behance, alongside identities for the Arctic Open film festival, a history of the Novaya Zemlya archipelago, and a book about a felt-boot factory. In 2019 he founded Plakat-Tsentr, an informal association built on a simple bet: designers who actually know each other make a stronger scene than designers who only follow each other online. Through it he runs “Igra v plakat” (“Poster Game”), a workshop aimed squarely at getting participants onto international shortlists, hosts “Design-Wednesday” meetups, and organises joint labs with the Typomania festival and the Golden Bee biennale.
It is a small piece of infrastructure with an outsized effect: a regional poster scene now has a shared room to stand in, and its designers are turning up on shortlists that used to belong to somebody else. Tyapkov’s own work travels on that same instinct for connection, shown at the international RED ZONE poster campaign alongside designers from Italy, Venezuela, Indonesia, Egypt, Mexico and Peru, and selected into Behance’s own curated Exhibition & Signage and InDesign galleries. He talked all of it through, visual culture, local codes, building a design community from nothing, on the Severny Ogonyok podcast.
Why we like it: he is precise the way a cartographer is precise, and somehow the letters still get to dance.
