not quite -- plan A was to become a typesetter, back when i was in school; everybody told me i definitely should go to art school but to me that was the most boring thing i could imagine. i wanted to do something more "real", and preferrably something that had to do with type, so typesetting seemed like a good idea.
i did some phototypesetting back then, and started working at a newspaper later on. that was quite design-heavy from the beginning -- the graphic concept of that paper was by cyan, after all --, and from there on it developed, with little jobs on the side and a couple of projects with other designers i had met at that newspaper. i also worked in pre-press for a long time, as a part-time job (late and night shifts, mostly), so i could continue to do free-lance design without being totally dependent on either side.
again, it basically just developed ... like i said, for quite a long time i was working part-time, so i could do more or less what i wanted -- i was interested in music, so that's what i did. the experimental/electronic music scene is quite small, you do something for artist A, who releases on label B, which in turn needs a designer for C ... of course this all sounds a bit easier than it is in reality, particularly with the nosedive that the industry took around 2000/2001. but then that's what every freelancer has to put up with.
however, i'm not really "in the industry" i must say. i'm only working for small and mid-sized labels.
a lot of my favourite music is electronic, yes. which doesn't mean that i don't listen to anything else -- now playing is a film score by godard, for example, the classical "nouvelle vague", which is an old favourite of mine.
i'm already working for mainstream musicians -- maximilian hecker for instance is very mainstream i would say; i just finished a web site for him. he sings romantic ballads and plays guitar and synthesizers and has a lot of 15-year old fans. i guess he knows that his music isn't entirely my cup of tea (although i definitely respect him for choosing such a hard-core traditional genre), and i've no idea what he thinks about the more experimental stuff that i'm doing, but we get along really well -- it's fun and it's very productive.
for me, the big difference is not "mainstream" vs. "experimental", but rather "small" vs. "large" -- every time i've been working for a company larger than 10 people or so, the production was an absolute nightmare. "the first set of designs they hated so i reworked them, then oh we like the new ones so can you change this, and then this and this and this, and then its nearly finished and they tell me they don't like it at all and have decided not to release it anyway. i don't know what planet they are on" -- that's from an e-mail i got yesterday from another designer, i'm just quoting it because it's *so* typical. the guy who wrote this is brilliant, there was nothing wrong with his work i'm sure.
i just mean to say it's not a question of style -- the reason i don't normally work for "large mainstream labels" is that a) they don't hire me and b) that's probably a good thing.
i listen to the music. and i talk to the label about the technical side -- time schedule, packaging formats, can i use spot colours, that kind of stuff.
i don't often meet with clients face to face, simply because most of them aren't in berlin in the first place. i prefer e-mail communication anyway -- it makes it so much easier to keep track of things, i mostly e-mail even with people who aren't that far away. apart from that, it really depends on the project ... sometimes i do everything on my own, sometimes i'm writing ten e-mails a day with questions and drafts and suggestions and stuff. there is no general rule.
it depends on what you mean by "tradition". i'm not consciously following anyone in particular -- a "school" or a "genre" or whatever --, but i'm trying to stick to certain principles, and most of them are not new.
from another point of view, both you and me are stuck in all kinds of traditions that we don't even notice because they feel so "normal": we use the latin alphabet, we write from left to right, we're associating colours and images with certain things ... that's already such a long trail, and it's just the habits of a small minority. graphic design as such is probably just another bizarre tradition after all, so in that sense i'm just as traditional as everyone else.
the main difference between those two projects was that the ferric CDR series is a collaboration with chris murphy / fällt publishing, and both the concept and the formal framework were already quite clear when i got involved. what i did was basically concept and research, not so much "actual" design -- the whole thing revolves around the name, "ferric" (as in cassette tape), since it's a burn-to-order label, and we needed some kind of metaphor that would get this across ... and, at the same time, allow serial production at minimal cost. that was the main thing, actually – for a burn-to-order label you can't print expensive four-colour sleeves every time, that would render the whole thing absurd. the solution we found was to print a uniform number array on the inlaycards and CDs, in the way of a pre-digital punch card, where the serial number of each CD is entered by hand. that's the main design element. so each sleeve is unique, but in a quite subtle way -- it doesn't shout out "hey! i'm hand-made!"
6.45KB, on the other hand, is a contribution to an online gallery -- the brief was, here's 264x200 pixels, one-bit colour: do something with it. i'm not sure actually if you can call this a design process ... for me, design goes like "here's some content, find a form", not the other way around. 6.45KB has more to do with photography, i think, or microscopy, than with design -- it's showing a picture of something that you can't normally see. in this case, the picture is random bits of data: snippets of the output of an old program of mine that reads the computer's memory and projects it onto the main screen.
very much so, yes. we've spent many long nights discussing, arguing, exchanging drafts ... he's one of the very few designers that really had a big influence on my work.
heroin went quite smoothly -- from what i recall there weren't many "stages" to speak of. at first i think stephan suggested a photo, but then it turned out this is going to be stencil print so they can't reproduce any photos, i made one other draft that stephan didn't like, and after that i sent him a few samples of patterns and he picked one. that was all. there was some more forwards and backwards with the colours, but apart from that it was really simple -- i had already made those patterns a while before; it's the patterns that sort of "happen" when you re-map colours to the system colour palette. a very fascinating process -- i collected a lot of those but never found out how it really works. they were initially meant to be a series, unfortunately this is the only one that ever got printed.
frequencyLib, on the other hand, was a long and difficult process. three different labels, three different designers, countless revisions, lots of arguments ... in a word, it was complicated beyond belief. in the end i only did the cd; stephan did the lp himself and has done all his designs on his own since then.
quite obviously, yes, not only when it comes to remixes. i mean, we're using the same tools, aren't we? digital music and digital design are structurally very alike, whether you look at remixes, or at loops or samples or compression or enlargement or whatever -- all of this exists in both worlds, it's common ground. that's what i'd see as a "link" in the sense of your question.
someone more competent than me has given a very good talk about this; the transcript is here:
are you talking about design or about "effects and finishes"? that's a big difference i think, which i don't think has anything to do with computers.
i can't imagine that computer usage has a negative impact on the intellectual abilities of any designer, but i'm certainly not old enough to judge this from own experience -- i started working in 1993, almost ten years after the first mac was released. however, the work of those designers i know that are significantly older than me doesn't seem to have suffered since they've started using computers, so i don't think it makes a big difference for them.
as for "effects and finishes", i'm looking at a magazine from the 1960es right now, an oversized black-and-white lifestyle thing, well-designed but with lots of ads. some of those are good-looking and some are trash, most are somewhere in-between; all in all the ads look a lot worse than the magazine itself. quite like today, i would say -- which means it obviously *is* possible to do bad design without the help of corel draw.
i don't think there's so much more crap out there today than there was fifty years ago -- it's just shoved in your face all the time, that's the difference.
it's probably true -- first of all, i'm indeed working on a laptop so it has to be true, but the analogy to "laptop music" is valid as well. even though a lot of musicians don't like the "laptop" label stuck upon them, what it actually just means, i think, is that you don't have an immediate act of "creation", like if you were a singer or a violinist, but focus on the process instead -- off the top of my head i couldn't name any "laptop musician" who isn't a composer at the same time. and that's precisely what i'm trying to do as well -- i'm interested in how an image, or a line of text, is constructed, rather than in the image as a result. i'm trying to work with the process of generation itself. that's one thing i really like about working with computers: you're free to think about what you want to do, from the ground up, not just how it should look like.
i hope not.
no. from the reactions i receive, this kind of publication is read by 90% design students, 5% design magazine editors, and 5% librarians – very unlikely that any of those would hire a designer. it would certainly be nice if anyone came up and said "hey, i've seen your stuff in so-and-so magazine, would you like to work for me", but it hasn't happened yet.
i found it too pretentious to put my full name everywhere, but i didn't want to infest the world with another silly company name either. that's why i used the short version. "berlin" is just the locator -- wherever i worked on something (most of the time that's berlin, of course).
i don't have a single favourite.