Currency of Hope
By: Zoran Zelenika
Tags: Branding, Design, Redemption, Logo Design, Bosnia And Herzegovina

This is about a design project, well kind of. It is mostly about accepting past and rekindling old dreams of the future, about unexpected meaning found in work, and about hope. So it’s not really about a design project. Ok, back to the beginning, best of all places.

A fading picture

I come from a small town called Mostar, nested in the southern part of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Famed for its UNESCO World Heritage monument Old Bridge and pleasant, Mediterranean climate, the city was for a long time a poster-child of the Yugoslavian vision of many nationalities living together harmoniously. Since those days it has suffered a brutal war and even more tragic decades of quasi-democracy that reeks of thinly veiled feudalism. The charming, diverse postcard image of the place is fading from living memory, wiped by reality that is infinitely more complicated, unstable and harder to swallow. So much harder to swallow in fact that I, along with many others, packed up with my family and left abroad years ago, beaten down repeatedly by the unrelenting rise of hopelessness and constant deterioration of the urban fabric.

To explain it simply, not much works in Mostar. It is a city trapped in a lawless limbo. It operates without a functioning City Council due to a political deadlock and also without local elections to vote a new Council in — due to the very same political deadlock. And so it has been for ten years and counting. One would be surprised how unceremoniously life carries on and how easy it is to forgo all shining dreams of a better tomorrow. Things just go on and acquire a patina of hopeless permanence. Ticking over until something moves, yet it never really does on its own.

However calcified in its current state, Mostar is still a stunningly beautiful place on its day. A summer evening can be a rhapsody of light, smell and sound that is so unique and precious — it could only ever be experienced, never efficiently conveyed in words or images. That’s the crux of the problem, potential for change and improvement is always tangible in Mostar. It is shimmering closely under the surface, like objects underwater in the dream sequence from Tarkovsky’s ‘Stalker’. But much like those objects, the latent potential remains unmoved, covered by a film of debris. This tangibility of potential change was the reason why my personal exodus from the place has been delayed more than it reasonably should have been. Same as the city, its people attain this illogical mantra of ‘tomorrow will be better’ — while accepting that everything is somehow getting worse.

Hidden currency

Obviously what’s needed is the desire and courage to implement projects that could benefit everyone equally, but in a permanently divided political structure that feeds on divisions and fear, any such project is simply voted down and reduced to a protracted quibble over who gets what. So it was in the beginning with the project I recently took part in — Mostar’s (ongoing) bid to win the European Capital of Culture (ECoC) 2024 title.

A group of resilient, determined and obviously somewhat masochistically orientated cultural workers, creatives and others — came upon the brilliant idea of doing something for their city that would by its very nature transcend all petty daily differences and become the banner under which all could unite. They decided to apply the most problematic city, of the most troubled county, in the most corrupted country of the most divided European region — to become the European Capital of Culture. Sounds like a plan doomed to fail and it would be if it wasn’t the hidden currency of the ECoC project — stories of redemption.

What I mean by that is — European Capital of Culture title was never intended to reaffirm existing culture hubs. The intention was always to find hidden gems and empower communities in reaching a new level of strategic cultural planning and development — having a broader regional impact. A good story is not only important, it is the paramount aspect of any application. And honestly, there are few better possible redemption stories than Mostar. Within this project Mostar’s dormant potential turned from a permanent generator of frustration and hopelessness into a treasure trove of projects and ideas. Every ripped fibre could be reconnected through art, all that was required was to make a bold step towards that other shore.

Hopeful design

My personal involvement in this project began after Mostar has passed the first round of selection and the Mostar 2024 Team was preparing their second and final bid, along with two other finalist cities. I applied to the competition to design the bid and was later selected by the team as the official designer. On paper it’s a fairly straightforward project, requirements being the design of the new application logo and the layout of the actual 100 page application book. But early on in the project I found myself in a position seldom occupied by designers — one of knowing way too much about the client. With intimate knowledge of all the problems the city has and my parting memory of the place being a somewhat bitter, emigrant one, I simply couldn’t fake not being emotionally involved and just do a job. It meant more and I wanted a piece of the redemption story for myself, but it didn’t come easy.

Logo Sketchbook snapshots

As it usually is with design projects, the best place to start was simply with pen and paper, trying relentlessly to find connections, make all the obvious errors and hopefully distill a big story into micro elements that could become a nucleus of this new brand. But try as I might I kept bumping into two elements at the core of it all — the Old Bridge was unavoidable as a symbol and however I tackled it I felt the picture emerging was the postcard one, the false polished lie that only speaks of good things. Mostar is not just the proud arch, gracefully spanning over rapid, cold waters. It’s a troubled place with an undercurrent of conflict that has been swept under the carpet for too long. As a symbol I couldn’t get away from the Old Bridge — but this one needed to be different.

The bridge to tomorrow

The City’s name itself is linked to the bridge, it’s what people come to see and it’s in many ways a living and breathing metaphor for the city—a pearl of architecture that unexpectedly grew on the outskirts of the Ottoman empire, destroyed and rebuilt, terribly mismanaged yet still seductive. But as a symbol it comes with a problem of familiarity which makes it too obvious. You’ll see it’s semi-circle arc on the City’s official logo, on a good chunk of branding solutions for local businesses, on every postcard, picture, souvenir. A looming presence that is difficult to tackle without falling into a cliche. I needed to design something I could swallow myself, not a false symbol peddled to tourists. This project needed to be but a mark to rekindle the imagination of locals. Turns out, the application team had the same problem and their brief explanation on the application tagline ‘Everything is bridgeable’ tackled the issue perfectly.

Everything is bridgeable. Why do we claim that everything is bridgeable? How do we know this? The answer is provided by our most famous symbol, the Old Bridge. Above the Neretva river it forms a perfect semicircle. We cross the bridge in the light of Mediterranean sun, accomplishing the visible, material and everyday. The other half of the circle is hidden beneath the surface. That other bridge is in dark depths of our suffering, secrets and mistrusts, our invisible divisions and unspoken fears. We seldom cross that bridge. Both bridges together form a perfect circle. The moment when this circle unites to become a light, burning ball of joint energy of thousands sharing the same desire — everything will become bridgeable. We’ll fill this circle.

It’s not the bridge that needs to be designed into a symbol, it’s the circle formed by merging the troubled past and desired future. And with that, it was clear where this needed to go.

Shapes to letters to words to a book

So what ended up being a base for the final design solution is a series of four simple, geometric pictograms that were assembled into the final logo. Each pictogram goes with an accompanying colour and these colours and pictograms are linked to the programme lines inside the application.

The basic building blocks of the design

Once these main elements were constructed, the logo itself was just around the corner. Pictograms form the letters, the bridge is combined with its invisible sibling beneath the surface revealing a burning sphere where all colours are combined. New MO2024 logo was ready.

Building blocks construct the final logo

This was the final solution the team accepted and we moved on to the design of the book, finalising it for print and sending it soon after to Bruxelles, packed with a lot of hope and expectations. My work was done, for now.

Paid in full

But much more than just a pack of books travelled that day to Bruxelles. For the first time in decades, citizens of this troubled place overcame the enforced divisions and did everything they could to achieve meaningful change. The potential was finally kindled into a fire, if only for a while. Their efforts were initially mocked, their starting position was terrible, the government meant to support them nearly sabotaged the entire project through bickering yet still they managed to pull it off.

Whatever the final outcome of the application bid, this has been one of the most rewarding projects I ever took part in. Though our paths have parted it was good to participate in that long awaited quiet uprising of competence over obedience, common good over individual profit, humanity over nationalism. It seemed unbridgeable until it wasn’t.

The sins and mistakes of yesterday can perhaps be paid in full by currency of hope.