i don't think i had a very clear idea what that meant, or how to go about it in practice, until i basically was one. while i was still in school, i was fascinated with language, as a system or code, and particularly with written language; at the same time i knew i was good at art, but the idea of going to art school scared the hell out of me. so i guess i figured that the print industry might be somewhere in the middle and hence a good way to go -- typesetting or printing just seemed more useful and reasonable to me than "becoming a designer".

all of this remained a bunch of vague ideas, though, until i was fifteen or sixteen: at that time, my school organized a short work internship for everyone, in an effort to put pupils in touch with the real world. out of sheer luck, i ended up in a print shop, which was where i realized that it was actually practically possible to have fun with printing machines and repro cameras and earn a living at the same time. i don't actually remember doing any typesetting there, but i'm sure they did that, too.

anyhow, from then on i kept going in that direction: i took up a part-time job in phototypesetting, worked at a newspaper and finally started to work in pre-press; all that time i did freelance design jobs on the side as well, but it only evolved into a 'real' profession little by little.

i started to work at an experimental local paper, scheinschlag, once i left school. that's where i learned a lot of basics in terms of technology and organization. i doubtlessly learned a lot about design in that time, too, but i wouldn't really call that an education; it was a mixture of learning by doing, reading up on things, and learning from others.

i worked there for two years, and when i left i kept working with some of the people i had met there. we designed and produced another paper, posters, record sleeves, and i think i learned a lot in that time as well -- i still remember how one of them called me one day just to let me know he'd figured out what alt-tab does in quark xpress.

at about the same time i took a part-time job in pre-press, which i kept for six years. the people there were very supportive, and i learned a lot of stuff that i would otherwise never have -- from fixing postscript errors and wiring networks to tracking down how many kinds of futura ultra bold there really are. all in all, i can't really tell where and when my 'education' ended and 'work' started -- as for most 'self-taught' people, there probably isn't a clear dividing line.

i'm not sure if my work would be so much different, but it would certainly look different. there's a lot of technology that i've never learned to use -- i'm unable to draw a text typeface, i neither have the tools nor the knowledge to do lithographies or wood cuts or 8mm films, and my attempts at calligraphy are pretty ridiculous. on the other hand, i doubt there's many 'proper' designers who ever touched a litho press again after they graduated, so i'm not sure how big the practical difference really is. also, i picked up a lot of things over time -- from working in pre-press in particular -- that i'd probably never have learned at college.

sometimes i wish i had a 'real' education, but that would be either computer sciences or civil law, definitely not design. if by some unlikely chain of events i would have ended up in a design program, i'm sure i would only have hated it. it would have been fun for a while to be able to play with the nice toys, but apart from that i'm sure i would have been bored, unhappy, and a pain in the ass for everyone else.

why should it have an 'obvious sense of place'? i live here because my family moved here when i was a child -- out of coincidence, that is. i don't have anything to do with it, and neither has my work. call me a 'berlin designer' if you want, but i find that about as meaningful as calling someone a 'vegetarian designer'.

seriously though, the music scene that i'm involved with -- at least the interesting part of it, experimental electronic music -- is simply not a local one. quite the opposite. nobody cares where people live as long as they answer their e-mails. the two most important collaborations i undertook in the last couple of years were with a designer in belfast, and a musician in saarbrücken. i would have a hard time to pin down where exactly the work 'took place' in either case. inside a phone line, perhaps?

i do make a point of having the place (or places) where i worked on something listed in the credits, but that's simply a locator -- who knows, maybe in 500 years it'll help someone track down the development of electronic music in the ancient times that we live in.

no studio for me, thanks. right now i have just enough work to keep myself busy, and in case i get a job that's too much for one person there's plenty of other freelancers that i'd love to work with. i've had very good experiences so far with project-based collaborations, both short and long term ones, and if i look at the hassle that others have with their companies i'm really happy that i don't have to deal with that.

what's the point of a studio, anyway? does the world really need another design company? isn't the whole concept a bit overrated? to me it sometimes looks like the only benefit is that you get to pick a silly name and a 'head of' whatever on your business card. i don't even have a business card, so what would be in it for me?

that's what i was interested in. actually my main interest was (and still is) experimental music, not electronic music per se, but a lot of that has just become electronic during the nineties. it's hard to pin down where and when it actually started, but over time it started to develop ... musician A releases on label B, which in turn asks me to do something for C, who recommends me to D, and so on. i'm certainly happy that it turned out like this -- even though it can be a bit onesided sometimes, it's great to be able to work with people who do something that both client and designer really care about, and that's new to them as well as to me.

it's a whole different plane than yoghurt packaging, for example: you get to start from zero with every new release, there is no 'default look', and in music design you always have a task that's very clear and concrete. that's one of the things i really like about it -- there is almost no waffling about 'target audiences' and such in experimental music, it's really about what's in the music.

no. i'm lucky, though, because i have an incredibly good tax consultant. fortunately, here in germany it's not overly complicated to run a business as small as mine -- as long as you don't earn too much and don't have any employees (or partners), it doesn't really count as a business at all, so the bookkeeping and such is relatively simple.

still, i don't know how i would have managed without professional help -- when i first hired my tax consultant i know i was thinking his fee was rather high, but it's likely the best investment i ever made. believe it or not, tax law can be an interesting subject if you have the right person explain it to you, and once you get the feeling that you roughly know what you're doing it can almost be fun.

anyhow, i don't know how any amount of business training would have helped me in the harder cases that i encountered in the last couple of years -- when a client goes bankrupt, they're bankrupt, and there's nothing you can do about it. fortunately, the electronic music scene isn't very large, so most people tend to behave reasonably -- most of the time i feel safe sticking with common sense.

i wouldn't mind bigger budgets, of course, or big projects ... but when it comes to big companies, from my limited experience there seems to be a correlation between size on one hand and confusion, disinterest, and boredom on the other. when i work for an individual or a small company, be it a musician or a painter or a shoe-maker, they're usually very much into whatever it is they are doing, obviously, because it is *their* work. for someone who does marketing for brand X of company Y, this kind of interest would be rare.