I’m Milana Lupashku, a typographer and book designer studying at HSE Art and Design School.I work with difficult material: archives, speeches, old newspapers, plays, photographs. I research it, find the form hidden inside it, and take it all the way to a printed and bound object.I’m open to internships, jobs and projects with publishers, museums and cultural institutions.
Let me tell you a story.
It begins with a pile of paper.
It’s just material, not a book. Yet.
Every story already holds its design.
I find it.
01. Diário de Salazar
(Book · 2026)
Diário de Salazar is a research book about António de Oliveira Salazar, the dictator who ruled Portugal from 1932 to 1968, and about the Estado Novo — one of the longest-lasting authoritarian regimes in 20th-century Europe.
One story, seen from many sides.I wanted to build a large, complete work that lets the reader see this history from many angles and fully immerse themselves in it. So the book brings together newspapers of the era, Salazar’s speeches in a bilingual edition, his biography, an obituary and historical photographs.How do you make newspapers, speeches and an obituary speak as one book?
Printed and hand-bound, with a die-cut cover: Diário de on the front, Salazar on the back.
The answers were in the material itself.1. Newspapers as entrance and exit. The book opens with newspapers from before 1968 and closes with newspapers published after his death. The title itself comes from Diário de Notícias, Salazar’s favourite newspaper.2. Azulejo blue. The colour of traditional Portuguese tiles tints every photograph and newspaper and holds the different materials together.3. Wide margins. A reference to the classical book canon and to the conservatism of the regime.4. Bilingual spreads. Speeches and the obituary sit side by side with the Russian translation.
02. Moscow Metro
(Book · 2025)
A book based on a lecture course about the Moscow Metro from Arzamas, an educational platform on the history of culture. It tells how the metro was built, what its architecture meant, and how it changed — from Stalin’s underground palaces to the stations built after the collapse of the USSR.How do you turn a series of lectures — long, spoken, full of history — into a book you can find your way through?
The metro became the map of the book.
1. Line colours as navigation.
Each page is marked with the colour of a metro line, so the reader moves
through the book the way they move through the city.
2. The metro’s own artefacts.
Signs, station clocks, tickets and tiles
formed the visual language of the book.
3. History in pictures.
Archival photographs of the stations run alongside the text,
with captions on both sides of the spread.
03. Dream Street
(Exhibition catalogue · 2025)
A catalogue for Olga Chernysheva’s exhibition «Dream Street» at GES-2 House of Culture. Chernysheva works with photography, video, painting and graphics, and continues the tradition of Moscow conceptualism.The exhibition is a journey through memories, images and sudden insights. It stages the artist’s symbolic world inside the space of GES-2.
A catalogue is usually a list. Works, captions, texts — one after another. But this exhibition is not a list: it is a walk.How do you turn a catalogue into a street you can walk along?
The format came from the title.1. A square that becomes a street. A square format opens into a long horizontal spread — the shape of a street.2. One continuous line. Images, texts and captions follow a strict horizontal line and flow one after another, like everything you notice while walking down a street.3. Entrance and exit. The catalogue has its own way in and way out, like the exhibition itself.
