Graphic design projects involved various objects, from packaging, boxes, and trademarks to advertising notices and posters, labels, or simple factory brochures. In the Soviet years, these types of design projects were relegated to the category of "industrial" or "applied graphics," "artistic construction," or "technical aesthetics," or were sometimes known by the rarely used terms "advertising" or "commercial graphics."

 

Graphic design projects were created by so-called "artist-constructors" receiving commissions from various ministries or the "Dailė" network of arts workshops, offices, or specific enterprises. The overall evolution of the design field in the Soviet system – and perhaps even artistic quality in general – was determined by decrees, rules, and resolutions "handed down" from above, as well as by priorities adopted by various commissions and councils. Graphic design was a creative field that existed between industry and art and between the technical and the aesthetic, marked by constant shortages of everyday products as well as modern showcase projects displayed at various exhibitions. Moreover, the field depended greatly on the initiative or inactivity of leaders and institutions and their policies. All of this transpired within the overarching context of a socialist economy, where the rules of competition, marketing, and advertising did not apply and where the functions of graphic design objects were never entirely clear:

 

 

In addition to propaganda texts about industrial graphics, artistic design, and the significance of advertising, there were also discussions about rhetorical questions that reflected the realities of the day: what could possibly be advised, much less advertised, when better quality products were being snatched up so quickly that most store shelves were always half empty?

 

A discussion of Soviet-era Lithuanian graphic design is made all the more difficult because of the fragmented state of information available about the period, with many archives destroyed or disbanded and surviving collections still in need of cataloguing. Any account must therefore begin with individual stories, a review of the period's most important institutions, their operating principles and the artists who worked for them, and with specific examples of graphic design using contemporary sources and eye witness accounts.

 

The renewal of Lithuanian graphic design was encouraged by several factors, including the modernization processes that began in the latter half of the 1950s; increased industrial production and a growing assortment of products; the "Art into Life!" program; and the Cold War's race to modernity (recalling Nikita Khrushchev's assertion that "We too have such things."). One of the keywords of the era "Tara" (Lithuanian for container or packaging), the simplified name given by artists working in the design field for their place of employment, the Experimental Package Design Bureau. The importance of this institution, as well as the specific circumstances imposed on graphic design, is revealed in the words of Kęstutis Gvalda, a long-time employee of the Bureau:

 

I don't know who came up with the idea to establish 'Tara', but it was a miracle. […] Though the name itself was horrible - students laughed at, it became a curse word. Tara ('container'), labels – this was the worst humiliation, but artists still went there to work. Everyone wanted to eat, so they went and paid no attention to anything. Interview with Kęstutis Gvalda, recorded by Karolina Jakaitė, December 16, 2009.

 

The initiative to open a specialized agency for container and packaging design was born in 1961, a time reviewed in the memoirs of the Bureau's founder and first director, Antanas Morkevičius:

 

 

In 1963, a Container and Packaging Design Department opened as part of the Lithuanian SSR Regional Economic Council's Central Planning and Design Bureau, employing 8 artist-constructors. The official opening date of the new Bureau, however, is considered to be June 9, 1964, when the Soviet Lithuanian Council of Ministers State Academic Research Works Coordinating Committee approved the establishment of the self-financed Experimental Package Design Bureau, which became the most important center of graphic design creation, production, and promotion in Lithuania from the 1960s to the 1980s.

 

It should be noted that other institutions were also active in advertising graphics both prior to the Bureau's emergence and after 1964. These agencies included the Lithuanian SSR Art Fund (Dailės fondas), which received commissions for graphic design projects for production by the "Dailė" art workshops in Vilnius, Kaunas, and Klaipėda, and an advertising department that operated in Vilnius from 1973 as part of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, overseen for many years by Rimantas Žilevičius. Some government ministries had their own in-house design units, while larger enterprises had full-time artist-constructors on staff, as was the case with the Pergalė (Victory) confectionary plant and the Stumbras liqueur and vodka factory in Kaunas.

The newly established Bureau invited young artists, trained in different fields at the Vilnius Art Institute, to become members of its staff. Many of these artists were graduates of the Institute's Graphic Arts Department, but artist-constructor positions were also filled by artists with backgrounds in painting, set design, frescoes and mosaics, ceramics, and textiles. The first employees at the Bureau included Romualdas Svaškevičius, Kęstutis Gvalda, Rasa Dočkutė, Marija Trečiokaitė, Vladas Lisaitis, Kęstutis Šveikauskas, Jadvyga Laurinavičiūtė, Raisa Šmuriginaitė, Lelija Bičiūnaitė, and Feliksas Ivanauskas.

 

It is important to note that, between 1960 and 1976, the Vilnius Art Institute also offered specializations in industrial graphic art and packaging design. Among the graduates in this field were Bureau employees Teresė Bajorūnaitė, Juozas Gelguda, Danutė Umbrasienė, Monika Urmanavičiūtė, Gediminas Karosas, and Rita Rozytė. Starting in 1965, the Bureau's staff was joined by the first graduates of the industrial art program, including Kęstutis Ramonas and Romana Kungytė, and later Pranas Markevičius and Kostas Katkus, among others.

 

The Artistic Construction Department was headed by Romualdas Svaškevičius (who changed his name in the 1960s to Jurgis Raslanas [1926–2001], by which he is better known), who oversaw the Bureau's designers for the first ten years of operation. Svaškevičius had worked at the Spindulys Printing House in pre-war independent Lithuania, and completed his training in graphic arts in 1953 at the Vilnius Art Institute, later working as the Director of Advertising and Technical Documentation at the Republican Scientific and Technical Information and Propaganda Institute. Svaškevičius also completed internship programs at packaging and advertising agencies in Prague, Leipzig, Halle, and Riga.

 

Under Svaškevičius' leadership, the Bureau implemented a number of ambitious initiatives and recruited more artists who comprised the core of its creative graphic design group: Astrida Žilinskaitė, Lidija Glinskienė, Giedrius Reimeris, Irena Katinienė, Laimutė Puodžiūnaitė, Petrutė Masiulionytė, Elena Lisauskienė, Vaidilutė Grušeckaitė, Teresė Ivanauskaitė, Raimondas Miknevičius, Birutė Matijošaitytė, Benediktas Radzkas, Gediminas Žilys, and others.

 

Before coming to work for the Bureau, some of these designers were already accomplished young artists whose paintings, prints, and book graphic imagery was already being displayed in exhibitions and published in art albums. Once they took up work in the design field, they learned "on the job", consulting with more experienced colleagues, clients, manufacturers, and sales staff and by studying foreign examples in books and magazines, then choosing one or another graphic design field in which they most preferred to focus.

 

Nearly every Lithuanian artists working in the graphic design field subscribed to the Polish architectural and design journal Projekt, in circulation since 1956, or the East German Neue Werbung (New Advertising) or the Czech magazine Umění a řemesla (Arts and Crafts). All of these publications contained a considerable amount of information, articles, and illustrations about the latest Western European and US designs, as well as a selection of beautiful photography and font samples. Bureau employees recall clipping various details from foreign magazines and pasting them together, letter by letter.

 

The Bureau designed and printed all types of packaging and advertising projects, (such as labels, bottle-neck labels, wrappers), produced cardboard boxes, designed trademarks and posters, and edited and published various advertising publications. The Bureau also designed visual promotional materials, honorary plaques, and decoration projects for holiday celebrations. Project fees also varied. The figures used by another graphic design institution, the Chamber of Trade and Commerce, are interesting by comparison. Žilevičius recalls:

 

 

Since it combined various fields and professional skills, the Bureau's structure was always conceptually geared toward a collective teamwork approach, given the integrated nature of advertising and packaging projects. In reality, however, artists worked on their own, often drafting projects at home or in their own studios. Gvalda remembers:

 

 

Artists look back fondly on their time at the Bureau and their warm interpersonal relationships and their more successful personal projects. Working on an "open schedule", they only rarely visited the Bureau, stopping in to pick up an order or to drop off completed projects.

 

Some team project achievements are worth mentioning here, in particular the introduction of corporate style consisting of an integrated set of designs created in one style from trademarks and letterhead all the way to the packaging and marking of individual products and the design of custom clothing and labeling. At the time, such a service was promoted as an innovative achievement of the Vilnius Bureau, but keeping in mind the circumstances prevailing in a planned economy, it was also one of the greatest paradoxes.

 

Svaškevičius (Raslanas), the creator of corporate brands for "Mąstis", a product of the Telšiai knitwear factory in 1966, and Anykščių vynas (Anykščiai Wines) in 1968, might be considered the innovator behind the concept of an integrated style. With the contribution of other Bureau artists in the 1960s, corporate brand designs were also created for the Association of Vilnius Baking Companies, the Gubernija brewery in Šiauliai, the Kalnapilis brewery in Panevėžys, and for companies such as Tulpė, Minija, and Metalistas, among others.