Springtime is cleanup time. Before we’re going to do some major updates and changes to this website here soon, I’m starting another short series where I would like to upload and post some really old (personal) work from the last 10 years that has gone offline long time ago and never reappeared until now. Public backups, so to speak.
The start is making a link I have come across on YouTube by accident this morning. I have not done any visuals for it, just the sound design. Here’s an old Fork Unstable Media piece from 2001, heavily influenced by depart (no embedding allowed). Also a good reason to checkout what Oel and Zanshin from depart are all about these days :-)
During the last 10 years, we’ve done tons of designs for screen, we’ve done a lot of CD/vinyl sleeves, poster, brochures etc, but we’ve never really designed a real, 3-dimensional space. So we’ve been pretty excited to work on our first exhibition booth for Future Audio Workshop (some more background information about this project can be found here).
Our budget for the booth was very limited. We couldn’t afford to buy or build any extra furniture/interior/construction, so we’ve rented a ready-made stand from the Messe Frankfurt:
Since a lot of other smaller exhibitors also use those kind of stands, our challenge was to create something distinctive and memorable with what we’ve had.
An obvious and easy option would have been to just cover the walls with posters. But we thought that a lot of other companies would go for this solution, and even covered with good-looking posters, the whole construction with its white walls would have looked ready-made. This is how the stands of our neighbors looked like:
So instead of hanging posters, we’ve decided to colour the walls. Because everything was rented we couldn’t paint the wall-elements, but we were allowed to laminate them. We made a 3d-sketch of the booth in Sketch-Up and tried different combinations of black/white/yellow (the FAW colours), included the 15° angle (which is an integral part of the corporate design) and added the logos.
We also rented two cabinets (for the iMacs on which the software was presented). The bottom part was of opaque material, the upper part was made of glass. So we’ve covered everything in black, except the top of the cabinet and a die-cut logo on the front, and placed an fluorescent tube in the glass cabinet.
The result was a illuminating effect - the logo was glowing and it made a very nice ambient lighting.
In the end we were extremely happy with our booth. It turned out exactly as we’ve planned it and it looked even better than we’ve imagined. It was a fun project and we hope to have a chance to work on something similar again soon.
After Johannes gave some insight into our latest work last week (and desperately tried to find excuses for not having updated our portfolio yet), we would like to present one current project in particular.
During the past months, we have been involved in the creation and development of a new audio software company called Future Audio Workshop. We are mainly responsible for all visual design parts. Until today, we worked on the visual identity of the company and its first product, a software synthesizer called “Circle” including logos, a brochure, business cards and a lot of merchandising material such as stickers, t-shirts, shopping bags or badges. We also designed the interface of Circle, just launched an advance website and are very excited to see our trade show booth design come alive tomorrow. Within the next months, we’re going to focus on the packaging for Circle, some advertising as well as some fine-tuning of the interface. We’ll keep you posted.
This week, Circle is going to be presented at the MusikMesse in Frankfurt and we’ll be there on March 12th and 13th. So if you’re around, please come by our booth and say hello!
We’d like to show you some bits and pieces here, and we’re also going to keep you posted about our MusikMesse adventures on the FAW Weblog.
Here is Circle’s main interface (go here for more of them and for some screencasts):
We meant to update the work section for quite some time… heck, we even planned a relaunch of the whole site. But we’ve always delayed it, since we’ve been pretty busy. It’s a lame excuse and we know it.
So for anybody who’s interested, here’s a little overview about what we’ve been working on in the last couple of months.
Our dear friends Tocotronic released a great album last year. Together with the band, we’ve been working on almost the whole graphical output surrounding this release. We’ve designed several CD/LP packagings, posters, advertising, the website (still in progress) and much, much more. Here’s a glimpse:
We also did the cover artwork for the debut album of Herrenmagazin, a young band from Hamburg. Their album is coming out in April and there’s a series of three limited 7″ singles preceding the longplayer. This is what it looks like:
For all your chocolate lovers: you can now order your daily dose at the Ritter Sport Online Shop which we developed together with Fork Unstable Media. While working on it, we tested almost all flavours. We recommend: Knusperkeks, Joghurt, Ganze Mandel, Weiße Voll-Nuss, Erdbeer-Joghurt, Marzipan, Voll Erdnuss, Voll-Nuss, Pfefferminz… actually most of them are quite tasty.
Comissioned by Jung von Matt/next, we did some conceptual and design work for Spiegel Wissen, a new kind of online encyclopedia by German news magazine Der Spiegel. At present, most of our work isn’t implemented though.
An ongoing project of ours is the maintenance and further development of the NIVEA Styleguide BRAND eSSENTIALS. Check out the new Logo Finder.
For our long-time client Native Instruments, we designed software interfaces for new versions of Guitar Rig and Kontakt last year. Currently we are working on two other Native Instruments products, to be released later this year.
Another music software company that keeps us busy is Future Audio Workshop from the Republic of Ireland. They are debuting with their first product at this year’s MusikMesse in Frankfurt. It’s a software synthesizer called “Circle” and we are not only responsible for the interface design, but also the visual identity of the company and product including packaging, website, advertising and the booth at the trade show. More about that in a few days.
It’s time to continue our little category “precious dwellings”, this time more related to the art department: The first time i came across Andrea Zittel was at the Documenta X in Kassel (again..) 10 years ago. I think her work fits perfectly into the precious dwellings category of this blog. Andrea Zittel mainly deals with the subjects customisation, flexible everyday living and mass production. Her objects are somehow hard to define: they are not stylish enough and too rough to regard them as design objects and they are also too much functional, pragmatic and useful to meet somehow the classical idea of art. She says: “I thought about becoming a designer but designers are responsible for making products that best serve the greatest number of people, and i don’t think that’s so liberating.” That’s true, of course! Being a designer myself i know that this can be a real pain in the ass sometimes. When it comes to selling a product “the elitist and idealistic designer” sometimes is forced to give in on his higher aims in order to meet the common mainstream standard, no matter what.. the daily inner conflict in a sensible designer’s life that is turning us into alcohol and drug addicts sooner or later! :-)
Anyway, Miss Zittel’s most interesting works for our category are the so-called A-Z Escape Vehicles (1997) and the A-Z Wagon Stations (2003), that she creates and sells based on the personal taste and getaway phantasies of the buyer and that are functioning as little mobile retreats/refuges. Whenever you want to escape enter the object and close the hatch. It is just the opposite of what people normally do to get away from it all: travel to exotic far away places. Retreat to your innermost!
Please continue reading only if you’re into fun stuff for insiders that is maybe even not funny for insiders that are not into cars.
Today, while I was walking around in the countryside near Nuremberg, enjoying the wonderful bavarian spring weather, Johannes sent me an email with a screenshot of the location of our former office on Google Maps. I was all alone, between country lanes and a rural industrial estate, but I had to laugh out really loud all of a sudden:
hej, the post reminds me on something. my lost yellow custom handemade bike i bought in copenhagen spring 2004. it was stolen in berlin. like all my bikes here. so if anybody see it? monospeed, no breaks, creamy soft well saturated yellow frame, brown mudguard and brooks leather saddle. the perspective in this productshot is a bit strange. the seat was nearly on the same heigt as the handle bar.
my daily dose of bike nerdism was slapped in the face when i came across this blog dedicated to Scandanavian Aesthtics. It covers basically everything *ahem* precious, like media, design, fashion, music and art.
in my perusal of “street art” websites I often come across lots of crap. however, i was rather excited to find a blog dedicated to the anti-graffiti movement or art of graffiti removal, which is known as THE BUFF. The great part about BUFFING is that given the right conditions, it too becomes a form of street art. this occurance is often attributed to:
1. not having the correct color of paint which matches the canvas’ original color.
2. realizing point 1 and trying to do your best to make the tagged facade acceptable by buffing in large geometrical patterns.
3. trying to just buff out the tag, by painting a similar color over it so that the original tag is recognizable.
at any rate the buffing blog has only gotten started, but i can foresee it acquiring a similar status to the banksy sister site (pictures on walls). read the blog and see some examples here.
Sometimes I like to take my MacBook to the dining table and work over there. I’m currently drawing some logo drafts with a physical pencil, so I need more space – and I have these comfy candles set up there. These things are making work post working day feel less work.
But there’s one downside: my external monitor is on the desktop (a physical one, of course). Since I just decided to try out some of my drawings with Illustrator I opened it up and figured out that the Preferences window is sitting on my external monitor (changing Illustrator Workspace won’t move it and I’m currently not into deleting Preferences). So I grabbed my MacBook, walked over to the desktop and connected the external monitor. Then I moved the missing virtual window to my Laptop screen, disconnected the monitor and physically went back to the dining table. Mercifully, I have a monitor at home and didn’t have to drive to the office.
There’s virtually no causality to this posting. I was just staring at my 4 meters afar, switched off screen, felt amused and wanted to share this with you.
