A reflection on the non-corporate meanings in a photo shoot for the Avito Design Team. A project where design solved more than an aesthetic problem.
This is the second project we've done for the team. ESH previously developed ADT's visual identity, where together we arrived at the metaphor of a guild of designers: a professional community united by a shared mission and shared values.
For Avito's designers, having a separate brand matters. Its integrity is how they identify themselves. Any step beyond the corporate is a creative gesture for them, a way to show that they're ready to stand out while working within a system.
The task itself was fairly specific: to bring a large team, from managers and art directors to designers, together in a single visual image. But projects like this usually have an extra layer that rarely makes it into the brief.
I'm a partner at ESH, but I wasn't personally involved in this work. What follows is what I found in this project once I got to know it, and how much deeper a designer's work can turn out to be when you look at it closely.
Where the reflection came from
The shoot for ADT was not just a way to get a visual result. It was also a way to bring people together and give them a chance to meet outside their usual workflow. As the project's art director, Ksenia Ovchinnikova, noted, this part was never spelled out explicitly, but it existed "between the lines": some people would travel in from other cities, people would get to know each other, and they would spend time together.
name: Ksenia Ovchinnikova
role: project art director
scope of work: Led the project from developing the concept and visual idea and getting it approved through to the final frames. Assembled the production team, was on set for all four days of shooting, worked with every participant, directed the photographers, oversaw the looks, and made sure that everyone felt comfortable and liked how they looked in front of the camera.
in her words: "There wasn't complete delegation here, but there was, of course, a great deal of trust."
So we were designing more than style, form, and images. We were designing an experience, of which those images were meant to be a part.
I first saw the project at one of our regular design reviews, meetings where ESH's teams show each other the results or the process of their work. It filled me with admiration. What I was looking at was clearly much more than an applied answer to an HR branding task set by a tech company.
For a corporate photo shoot, it has too much time (and too many times), too much materiality and tactility, and way too much melancholy.
I saw in it a search for something lost. An appeal to memory, a memorialization of the present, and many other messages that I wanted to bring to light. I wanted to work out what exactly I see in this project and why it makes such a complex impression.
Why reflect on a commercial project
Beyond the process of design decisions, there’s always one more level: how the work will be read by people. A designer can solve a problem, yet the object they've made goes on existing outside their control. It enters the context of its time, begins to interact with it, and sometimes says more about that context than the project brief ever intended.
I think it's important to look at commercial design as more than just an applied discipline. Designers produce cultural artifacts and record what is happening to society. Sometimes consciously, sometimes intuitively. That's exactly what makes the ADT shoot interesting to me.
I see in this project several important layers, through which we can look not only at one particular shoot but also at the state of contemporary design, the designer, and society.
Layer 1: Time collapses into a collage
Several historical eras are present in the project at once.
- The Middle Ages, through the imagery of the guild and craft, and through the romantic myth that ties that era to the nineteenth century, to the very manner in which the nineteenth century imagined and celebrated the Middle Ages.
- The nineteenth century, through the Petzval lens and cyanotype.
- And the present, through Avito as a modern digital technology corporation.
The result is a paradoxical collage of time, in which different eras don't follow one another but coexist.
What's especially interesting is that the Middle Ages here are not an attempt to reconstruct historical reality. They're a fantasy of the Middle Ages created by Romanticism. Ksenia says that the image of the romantic hero emerged in the course of the team's joint search: a fairly dreamy, sensitive person, able to find wholeness in a relationship with nature.
So the project doesn't quote a historical style. It shows how one era looks at another.
Layer 2: Running away in order to return
The initial request was about creating a space where people and their feelings could have a place again. Ksenia speaks of fatigue with what is happening and what we observe: the visual noise and the endless stream of news. Escapism here can be understood not as a rejection of reality but rather as a way of temporarily regaining the ability to feel and perceive.
This raises a broader question. Can the desire to slow down, to turn to the past and create a temporary world outside reality, be seen as a reaction to the experience of recent years: political instability, an uncertain future, information fatigue?
The medieval world of the shoot becomes a space where one can step out of the present for a while in order to feel it again. It's also important that this is not only a visual world but a shared experience for the team: several days lived at a different rhythm from the corporate everyday, with a material imprint left behind in the form of photographs.
This is the paradox of escapism: to give people back the capacity to live and feel, the project creates an artificial world set apart from the present.
Layer 3: The past enters the production process
The project creates an alternative present and, at the same time, produces a memory of it.
Participants received three final images, one of which was also printed by hand as a cyanotype. The printing alone took about two weeks and required consistent manual work. The result depended on light, air, and exposure time, so prints often had to be redone. Alongside the photographs, the printer Sofia Kompaneitseva made individual packaging: hand-stitched envelopes.
As a result, the photograph becomes more than an image on a screen. It becomes an object. We can go a step further and suggest that this is a form of anticipatory nostalgia: not nostalgia for what has already been lost, but an attempt to preserve the present before it becomes the past (nostalgia for oneself, alive).
Layer 4: Inefficiency turns out to be valuable
There's a contradiction that strikes me as characteristic of the modern design industry. We work inside a culture built around speed, efficiency, and optimization. Digital tools let us create images almost instantly, change them endlessly, and produce more and more variations. Generative technologies take this logic to its limit: the image becomes a virtually infinite asset. And then, inside a technology corporation, a project appears that is built on the opposite logic.
An old lens imposes constraints on photographers. Analog printing takes time. Cyanotype can't simply be put on a production line: the result depends on physical conditions and manual work. You can't line up five options on a screen and instantly pick the best one; the samples have to be looked at, touched, and compared in person. Ksenia specifically mentions that in this process you can't just hit Ctrl+Z. You have to accept its unevenness and chance.
It turns out that inefficiency itself becomes part of the value.
And here another interesting layer appears: materiality as a new luxury code. The old lens, the hand printing, the specialist knowledge, the limited number of copies: all of this makes the image valuable not only because of what it shows but also because of how much time, attention, and human labor has gone into it.
Resistance to speed becomes a marker of luxury. And technology starts to be fetishized: what matters to us is not just the result but the particular way it was made.
Layer 5: Melancholy shows through the corporate image
Finally, I think it's important to look at how the person turned out in the frame.
The client's original request was for warmth, humanity, and emotion. But the result can't simply be called cheerful: there is distance in it, melancholy, a decadent aesthetic, a sense of an endangered species.
- This contradicts the standard corporate image of a person as energetic, happy, engaged, and productive.
- The project allows a person to be alive not only in energy and efficiency, but also in dreaminess, distance, detachment, and escapism.
- And that raises the question of which human states corporate culture permits at all in the first place.
The value of projects like this, and of a designer's reflection
Most of the layers I noticed were not in the brief. They emerged gradually, as the team searched, chose visual codes, worked with the photographers, and tested materials, and as the project continued after the shoot itself. Ksenia describes the process as very intense, collaborative work: experiments with paper, color, and exposure time, hands-on review of the prints, and a constant return to the question of whether the result matched the original idea.
Perhaps this is where the line runs between solving a task and doing research. It isn't in the ability to come up with a beautiful concept, but in the willingness to stay inside a project long enough for it to start saying something bigger than the original brief.
For me, this project is an example of exactly that kind of work. It has a desire to slow down in a culture of acceleration, to touch something material in a world of endless digital images, to create a memory of the present, and to give people room for states that don't fit well into the corporate picture of the world.
I think the value of projects like this lies not in solving an aesthetic problem (making something better or more beautiful). Nor is it merely that a well-made photo shoot turns out to hold an unexpectedly large number of meanings. The value is that good design can sometimes capture a cultural state that we ourselves haven't yet had time to notice and put into words.
Seen this way, a commercial project can no longer be regarded only as an applied solution to a specific task. It becomes a genuine cultural imprint, with its own aesthetic, its own system of values, and its own contact with the time in which it appeared.
In this sense, design is not only part of a professional practice but also a way of recording the present, sometimes more accurately than we realize while we're working on the project.
