Visiting BILD

Our annual Berlin study trip again included a visit to Axel Springer - one of the largest publishers in the world and publisher of Europe's largest circulation newspaper, BILD.

Axel Springer's Head of Apprenticeships, Dual Studies & Talent Attraction, Uta Bendixen, organised a tour of the BILD Newsroom, which included a talk by BILD's Editor about the future of publishing, and how the company's graphic design team produces the newspaper, whose circulation is over 1.5m copies each day.

We also visited Axel Springer's incubator project Accelerator, a joint venture between Plug & Play Tech Center and Axel Springer SE, where startups and new technology brands are nurtured and developed - http://www.axelspringerplugandplay.com

Berlin Letterpress Experience

As part of our annual study trip to Berlin, we booked the Year One Graphics class on a visit to P98a - Erik Spiekermann's fantastic Letterpress studio located on Potsdamer Strasse in central Berlin.

Spiekermann set up this studio primarily to work on personal projects and exploring how letterpress type  can be redefined and used in the 21st century. The studio is equipped with a number of Korrex letterpress machines and Heidelberg Windmill press as well as a modern Riso printer.

The studio also designs and cuts its own wooden letterpress type.

Director Ferdinand Ulrich  explained how the studio operates, demonstrated setting up the machines, and showed the class samples from Erik Spikermann's collections - including font specimen books from the early 1900s, and more than 500 cases of poster type, mostly made from wood.

Ferdinand's colleague Lunia  D'Ambrosino also explained how she had applied for an internship at P98a having graduated with a Bachelors degree in Visual Communication.


Typesetting a poster on the Korrex.


Editorial piece printed via Letterpress


Erik Spiekermann's signature quote, letterpress A1 posterzine.


Ferdinald Ulrich talking to the class.


Find out more about P98a on their website, and visit if you happen to be in Berlin.

Visiting Edenspiekermann

As part of our Berlin trip this year, we were really excited and very fortunate to visit Edenspiekermann.  For many designers, Edenspiekermann is best known for its work with Monotype's FontShop. The agency motto is 'Design is in our DNA'.

Based in Potsdamer Strasse in central Berlin, the agency specialises in digital products, branding and service design, and is the result of a merger in 2009 between Spiekermann Partners (founded by the typographer Erik Spiekermann), and Dutch design agency Eden.

Martin Stadler

Director of Brand Consulting Martin Stadler kicked off the afternoon with a great talk to our 32 students. His presentation focussed on a recent project - HIAG Data - which featured a new brand identity, bespoke typeface design, and an innovative web design for a Swiss-based data hosting company.


Martin Stadler talking about the brand experience.

Martin explained Edenspiekermann's approach to branding as having four key elements - storytelling, brand experience, design & identity, and development.  He discussed how the agency worked with HIAG during the research phase, and the way that this led to the development of a 'visual language' for the brand which the client could be directly involved in.

As well as going into great detail about the art direction and storytelling concept behind the project, Martin showed the students how the design ideas developed and were improved or rejected, including many iterations of the typeface and the screen designs which didn't make it into the final product.

"We see failure as something that's necessary because it drives you to the right solution." -  Martin Stadler

Bastian Boss

Martin's colleague Bastian Boss was up next, to talk about his area of expertise, Service Design.  He gave some great examples of how research is key to this emerging area of design. and how Edenspiekermann use the technique of 'cultural probes' to collect the key insights into how users experience a given service or product. A big part of process was analysing the design impact that the work had upon the end users.

"Things are changing fast in Service Design, so for sure, we are continually adapting our tools and methods." -  Bastian Boss

Bastian presented a case study for NS Pro Rail (Nederlandse Spoorwegen, the Dutch national railway) which tackled the signage and experience issues we all associate with waiting for, and boarding, trains.  You can read more about Bastian's approach to Service Design in a great article he wrote about it here.


Bastian explaining his approach to Service Design.

Internships

There was also an added bonus with the introduction of Julian Thiel, a design student, who talked about his experiences on a three-month internship at the agency. Julian explained that although a high level of work was demanded of him, the ability to fit into a team and to be able to tackle a wide range of different design challenges, were really important. In return for this level of commitment, Edenspiekermann generously pays its interns at double the standard rate in Berlin.

"One of the main things I've learned here is to argue for your design decisions." - Julian Thiel

After the talks our hosts held a great Q&A and covered everything from applying for an internship, customising your portfolio,  to the continuous skills development necessary these days in design, to the benefits of working in collaborative multi-disciplined (and often multi-cultural) teams.  This was a fantastic experience for the students and a great example of how industry can support and help develop design education.



The Edenspiekermann Berlin Kitchen Experience!


Martin offers up some words of wisdom after the talk.


Design Tutors Alex Gunn (l) and Chris Hughes (r) with Martin Stadler.


More:
HIAG Data case study
NS Pro Rail case study

#berlin 17 Transmediale

Transmediale is Europe’s premiere festival of digital arts, culture and technology. Each year the programme features cutting-edge films, installations, performances, workshops, and other events at the impressive Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of World Cultures) in central Berlin.

This year Transmediale celebrates its 30th anniversary, and we attended the opening night on Thursday where more than 1000 students, artists, technologists, educators and designers gathered from all over the globe to celebrate digital culture and creative collaboration.

All the workshops, exhibits and activities centred on theme of 'ever elusive' - the geopolitical turbulence in the modern world, the redundancy of data, and and our reactions to it through audio-visual media.

Highlights of the opening night included a performance by Black Quantum Futurist Collective, a DJ set by James Ferrano, a stand showing a selection of Transmediale's published work since 1987 - magazines, programmes, manifestos and catalogues - and some stunning and original installations as part of the 'alien matter' exhibition.




Transmediale 30 years of printed matter.



Joep Van Liefland 'Video Palace #44' - This exhibit deals with plastic waste and the redundancy of complex data, and consists of a huge sculpture - an enclosed  wall - made entirely of some 20,000 VHS videotapes.



Addie Wagenkecht - xxxx.xxx - a sculpture consisting of five circuit boards and hundreds of flashing green lights connected by a series of Ethernet cables. The circuit boards tap into data streams on nearby Wi-Fi spots and analyse them, resulting in a continuous blinking pattern of the lights - every blink indicating the process at work.  This looked particularly striking in the exhibition environment - pitch darkness.

Transmediale also runs in conjunction with the CTM Festival of experimental sound, with events held at world-famous clubs such as Berghain and Tresor.

More:
Transmediale website
CTM Festival website

#berlin15 - Buchstaben

Berlin is home to the Buchstaben Museum, which has an amazing collection of neon signs, letters and fonts from the former GDR.  Last year our visit to see this unique collection was a highlight of the trip, so this year we returned with an even bigger group of design students.

The collection is housed in an old supermarket on Holzmarktstraße, a few minutes south of Alexanderplatz, and features an array of signage salvaged and renovated from the shops, factories and public buildings of East Berlin after the fall of the Wall in 1989. The museum shop sells some of these original typographic artefacts, as well as stocking a bunch of awesome posters, pamphlets, accessories and type books. This year there was also a small exhibition focussing on a number of famous Berlin-based typographers and their working methods, including Erik Spiekermann.

#berlin15 - Transmediale

As part of our annual study trip to Berlin, we attend Transmediale, Europe’s premiere festival of digital arts, culture and technology. Each year the programme features cutting-edge films, installations, performances, workshops, and other events at the impressive Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of World Cultures) in central Berlin.



This year the theme at Transmediale was 'Capture All' - focussing on how we create, use, share and interpret digital media in all of its forms and how this is affecting our lives. The festival opened on Wednesday 28th with more than 1000 students, artists, technologists, educators and designers attending from all over the globe. As well as free access to the full festive exhibition and free wine, DJ Renaissance Man put on a two hour set running till 11pm as attendees networked and soaked up the atmosphere.

In past years Transmediale has tended to feature a lot of conceptual digital art, virtual interaction and installation work, so it was great for our design students to see what felt like a much more tangible exhibition this year, containing some stunning and original visual communication via print, screen and video, including the following highlights -

Main Exhibition : Jennifer Lyn Morone

In this standout piece, the artist turned herself into a real corporation called Jennifer Lyn Morone™, Inc.  As a commercial venture, she presents herself and her belongings as items in which you can buy shares.  In this way, as a direct attack on the culture of data-mining,  digital marketing and social media, none of her personal data can be shared, stored or accessed unless the viewer actually owns it. Morone explains this idea in a cool video, alongside documents detailing the incorporation, plus the terms and conditions of her personal data market. There's also an iPad App where you can select and purchase Morone's email, mood, and location data, amongst other personal information. Check out more about the project on the web at jenniferlynmorone.com

Main Exhibition : Networked Optimization

A collaboration by Silvio Lorusso and Sebastian Schmieg, this work uses digital publishing and access to reading materials to examine data interaction. The work presents a series of three crowdsourced versions of popular self-help books — The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, The 5 Love Languages, and How to Win Friends and Influence People. The books are displayed on a glass table for reading, but when you pick one up and flick through it, almost all of the pages are empty. The cover artwork for each title is also devoid of text.



The only text that remains readable is a selection of popular highlights - passages which were underlined by Kindle users – together with the tally of highlighters who have read each title. Each time a passage is underlined, it is automatically stored by Amazon. The e-books can be downloaded, and paper copies are also available in the HKM bookshop.

Guest Exhibition : Ellie Harrison

For almost five years Glasgow-based artist Ellie Harrison recorded information about every aspect of her daily routine.  The result was a spectacular piece of work called 'Timelines', which documents everything she did, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for four weeks.

Each day the data about every activity was transferred into an excel spreadsheet. By the end of the four weeks it contained 2,297 entries, which were then transposed into a series of 28 colour-coded timelines.  This produced a dazzling infographic which allows the viewer to identify any activity from the artist's life, including eating, showering, commuting to work, buying food, using email, driving, socialising and so on.

Foyer Programme : Datafied Research

This panel-led event discussed the findings of a year-long project exploring Transmediale's theme of 'Capture All', and looked at issues surrounding the limits to how much personal information about us can or should be digitised. The panel featured participants from the Datafied Research PhD workshop between Aarhus University and the School of Creative Media, Hong Kong City University. The results were also published as a peer-reviewed newspaper, which was launched at the festival and exhibited in the foyer. All the double-page spreads were hung up in a flatplan sequence to create a huge single image as a landscape poster. On the other side of this, all of the findings, statistics and related articles, beautifully typeset, were there to read. We managed to pick up a few copies of this nice editorial product for the studio.

Foyer Programme : Hybrid Publishing Toolkit

This workshop, held on Friday, was part of the Digital Publishing Toolkit research project, and featured a presentation by Florian Cramer, Patricia de Vries, Miriam Rasch and Margreet Riphagen, who described a set of tools for digital publishing. The Toolkit, available as an e-book, is aimed at anyone working in art and design publishing, providing hands-on practical advice and focusing on working solutions for low-budget, small-edition publishing.  Approaches for the use of the toolkit can include catalogues, magazines, research publications, and design or art-themed books. More can be found at the networkcultures.org, including a free download of the e-book.

Transmediale also runs in conjunction with the CTM Festival of experimental sound, with events held at world-famous clubs such as Berghain and Tresor.

More:
Transmediale flickr stream
Transmediale facebook page
Transmediale website
CTM Festival website

All Set for 2015

Welcome back! January is traditionally one of our busiest months, as Semester One winds up and crosses over into Semester Two.

In terms of project-work, our NC group are presenting concepts for their Roses projects tomorrow, and have been issued with a new magazine brief; the HNC group will be handing in their YCN; and our final year students are finishing up their ISTD typography project, as well as getting ready for placement in February.  Last year we had 26 agencies and studios involved in the placement programme, and this year is shaping up to be just as successful.

Besides all of this course activity, our annual Berlin trip is happening during the last week of the month. Traditionally we take 30 students from Graphics and Interactive Design students to Berlin for seven days, primarily to attend the renowned digital festivals Transmediale and CTM. We've also arranged a number of museum outings, plus a visit to Saatchi Berlin, where one of our former students, Victorija Kravcova, is a designer. Big thanks to her for arranging a talk with the Creative Director at one of the biggest agencies in Europe. We can't wait.

Elsewhere, we have just renewed our D&AD Education membership, and have also secured our Final Show exhibition space for 2015 at one of Edinburgh's best cultural venues, the Fruitmarket Gallery. We'll soon be announcing details of our next One Week project, due to commence in March.