CODPA project "Sites of Ancient Battles"

The "Sites of Ancient Battles: Animated Reconstructions of Events That Changed the Course of History" is a grant project by the Center for Protection and Research of Archaeological Monuments (CODPA), funded by the Ukrainian Cultural Fund (UCF), about battles in the Poltava region that affected the course of Ukrainian history. My role wasn’t decorative — I worked as art director and visual researcher, translating dry historical reports into a language of clear graphics.

Client

CODPA (Center for Protection and Research of Archaeological Monuments)

Service

Art direction and historical illustration

PROBLEM

Archaeologists are notorious sticklers for detail (I can say that with love — I used to be a scholar myself). You can’t just draw whatever "looks nice" or add invented artistic flourishes here: the cut of the hetman’s zhupan, the shape of a flagpole, the landscape, or the fortifications of Hovtva fortress — every element had to trace back to a clear historical source. My main challenge as a designer was finding the balance: keep the historical accuracy the donor and scholars demanded at one hundred percent, while presenting it so social-media users wouldn’t feel like they were flipping through a boring textbook. On top of that, before the work even began, I was faced with a huge pile of scattered data — text descriptions, fragments of old chronicles (like Szymon Okolski’s diary), archival maps, and modern photos of the excavation site. All of it had to be filtered through me, stripped of the unnecessary, and structured.

SOLUTION

My role on this project wasn’t ordinary decoration — it was the work of an art director and visual researcher, translating dry historical reports into a language of clear graphics. In essence, I built a graphic "navigator" so the artists on the production side would clearly understand the terrain, the logic of troop movements, and what the characters looked like. For the promotional materials — historical carousels about figures like Yakiv Iskra-Ostrianyn or Stanisław Potocki — I combined authentic period portraits and engravings with modern digital techniques: deep shadows, accent lighting, and minimalist graphics. That was a deliberate choice to modernize how audiences perceive these historical figures, to make them feel "alive," without turning the project into something cheap and glossy. A whole separate chunk of work that usually stays behind the scenes was the technical preparation of the primary sources: cleaning up and colour-correcting old, often poor-quality images of maps and portraits, adapting photos of the modern landscape (the Shar-Hora tract) to a unified style, and creating graphic assets for different platforms, including podcast cover art.

RESULT

I really love this project because it combines science with popularizing it. It proves that design in grant-funded and cultural projects isn’t about decoration. It’s about the ability to structure chaos, understand the constraints set by donors and scholars, and build visual systems that help preserve local historical memory. And, most importantly, it shows just how important it is to fight for your own existence and to remember where you come from.