Design Is Not Against Art or How to Add Expressiveness to Works Through Artistic Techniques. Nastichka Zherebetska

Expected to be available in December 15, 2026. The timeline may change depending on safety and infrastructure conditions.

What do Théodore Géricault’s work and a poster for a Dziga Vertov film have in common? What connects a painting by Bosch with a poster for Kyiv’s Zhytny Market? And what do Frida Kahlo’s self-portrait and Marcel Breuer’s iconic chair have in common?

Design Is Not Against Art, or How to Add Expressiveness to Works Through Artistic Devices is the first book by Nastichka Zherebetska. A designer and art director, editor-in-chief of the Chronicle of Ukrainian Design and co-founder of the design studio Spiilka, the author explores artistic devices that help reveal the ideas behind works of art and objects of design more deeply.

The book features more than 200 artists, designers, studios, and brands whose works are examined through the lens of 30 artistic devices, from familiar metaphor and hyperbole to the more obscure epizeuxis and synathroesmus. The author explains these devices through dozens of examples from literature, art of different periods, and works of type, graphic, industrial, and digital design.

Some of these devices are familiar to us from literature classes or rhetoric courses. But who would have thought that the visual language of posters and masterpieces of painting is built on the same principles? The author — who, incidentally, is also a philologist and a Japanologist by training — takes readers through the maze of little-known Ancient Greek and Latin terms, using clear instructions to explain how these devices work in packaging, visual identities, apps, websites, typefaces, and even furniture.

For ease of reference, all the artistic devices are grouped into sections: contrast, image, order, disruption, and connection. Together, these sections help readers understand how artistic devices work in the context of art and when they can be applied in design.

The book brings together the devices through which we perceive the world of visual language and art. But this is not simply a work of theory: through concrete examples, the author guides readers toward recognizing these devices in the world around them and understanding how they can transform a simple statement into a work of art.

Team

Idea and text author: Nastichka Zherebetska
Publisher: ist publishing
Project management: Kateryna Nosko
Production management: Nastia Leonova
Design concept: Nastichka Zherebetska
Layout and prepress: Kseniia Havrylova
Literary editing: Iryna Kurhanska
Proofreading: Olha Petrenko-Tseunova
Copyright lawyer: Mariia Farbota
Copyright management: Mariia Sharova, Oksana Kravtsova
Communications management: Mariia Kharenko