Peter Baker is disarming. The youngest contributor to the fStop collection, his work is a synthesis of studied professionalism and youthful exuberance. He graduated from the University of Michigan in 2000 with degrees in graphic design and photography.
Peter has planned and designed websites for several companies, produced a series of films, edited a documentary, and started and maintained a small, hand screen printing shop. After graduation he spent a year at Borders Group Inc., resulting in a huge body of work: a company-wide intranet, the Borders.com newsletter, in-store signage and posters, as well as many newspaper and magazine advertisements. Pete is currently a senior designer at BCBS in Chicago.
'There are underlying principles in any visual language, regardless of what technology, medium, or style we layer on.'
Alexander Branczyk has the remarkable ability to produce work for entire populations and small sub-groups simultaneously. At MetaDesign, Alex worked on large corporate identity and public transport projects by day and designed for the techno/house scene by night. His art direction for the magazine Frontpage led to six years of design experimentation.
In 1994 he founded xplicit ffm in Frankfurt with Thomas Nagel and Uwe Otto. The company has since grown, and recently opened its second office in Berlin.
'Design should be human, not perfect.'
A two-hour course in HTML at the University of Virginia spawned Thomas Brodahl's interest in web design. In March of 2000 he approached designers Yohan Gingras and German Olaya to start an online design magazine, and the popular Surfstation (surfstation.lu) was born. Surfstation, like its friends Kaliber10000 and Design is Kinky, has become a cornerstone of the online design community.
Born in Norway, Thomas now lives in London, where he works as a freelance designer and illustrator.
Long-time New York City resident David Byrne was born in Scotland but spent his youth in Baltimore, Maryland. He attended the Rhode Island School of Design in the early '70s. After years as singer and rhythm guitarist in Talking Heads, David has released a series of solo efforts, including his most recent "Look into the Eyeball."
In 1990 Byrne started the Luaka Bop record label, releasing work by artists including Cornershop, Tom Ze, Zapmama, and Los Amigos Invisibles.
David's interest in graphic design, music, art, politics, and literature has led to a number of book and installation projects. Among them, the collage-style manifesto "Your Action World," on which he collaborated with fStop catalogue designer Stefan Sagmeister.
David's images for fStop represent a few of the ongoing series of photos he has been making. They seem to imitate practical and useful photography, raising the question: Is the respresentation of something practical and useful, practical and useful?
David Carson must delight in the irony of The End of Print being the best-selling graphic design book ever. He shook up the industry in the early nineties with his work in Ray Gun, garnering nearly equal amounts of criticism and acclaim. While detractors initially deemed his style a fad, time has shown it to be much more.
David's work has been published in countless magazines. He's designed clothing, published books, directed television commercials and made short films.
A master of collage, David melds the typographic with the visual and is just as happy to deconstruct a word as an image. He takes pictures the way he designs - instinctively - trusting the camera to record what he knows to be there.
'Don't mistake legibility for communication.'
See also: Fotografiks by David Carson and 2nd Sight: Grafik Design After the End of Print by Lewis Blackwell
Born and raised in Vienna, Nader has a singular passion for digital design (and for art in general), which he's been cultivating since he got involved with computers at an early age.
Having moved to Berlin just a few years ago, Nader works as freelancer for business clients and on his own art projects while studying at Universität der Künste. His main interests include print and web design, photography, programming, and becoming very, very important.
Nader founded the [p]ixelshit.network in 1999, which he uses to present his art, noise and culture in a unique and entertaining way. Not only a personal playground, the [p]ixelshit.network features artists from around the globe.
'Should I open you a can of pixelshit, darling?'
David Crow is interested in visual language and semiotics, particularly communication which uses informal means and "low art" media. He identifies his primary area of interest as "typographic dialects and the narrative of signs." His work is largely research-based and supports his role as the head of the graphic arts department at Liverpool School of Art and Design.
David was born in Galashiels, Scotland and studied graphic design in Manchester, graduating in 1985 when the city was still heavily influenced by the Punk/New Wave music scene and the design work of Malcolm Garrett and Peter Saville. After completing his studies, he worked as a designer at Assorted Images, and then at Island Records in London, before running his own practice and personal graphics project, Trouble.
David was a guest speaker at the 1999 Icograda International Congress Oullim in Seoul, and won the "Best Print" Liverpool Design Award in 2000.
Dominik Gigler is a London-based German photographer whose work includes editorial for Tank, Mined, Spoon Men and the latest issue of Zoo. He is currently working on projects for the advertising and music industries. Born in Landshut, Germany, Dominik studied at the State Academy of Photography and Design in Munich before moving to London to begin working as a freelancer. He earned an MA in photography from London College of Printing.
Dominik's primary interest lies in "our environment and how it shapes the human," which he explores through a unique and compelling style of portrait and documentary photography.
April Greiman is fascinated by space and scale. Her work, characterised by layering and manipulation, proves that a good image is worthy of a number of interpretations.
Already an established graphic designer when computers became part of the process, Greiman quickly embraced the technology - primitive though it was at the time. She firmly believes the computer's role should be a visible one; that a piece's origins ought not be masked. In her experience, the computer has lent an element of surprise to the design process, at times even leading it in a whole new direction.
April Greiman was educated in the United States and Switzerland and makes her home in Los Angeles, California. She's won innumerable design awards and has taught at a number of renowned institutions in the Los Angeles area.
'Form and content exist together.'
See also: Something from Nothing (Design Process) by April Greiman
Markus Hanzer is a philosopher of found type. As the director of www.typemuseum.com, based in Vienna, he looks for meaning in the images that surround us - whether the product of design or happenstance. Worn away letters, remnants of layered posters, conjunctions of disparate signage, they all communicate something he clearly delights in pondering.
For one so fascinated by this dynamic form of typography, it is interesting that most of Hanzer's work revolves around the world of television. In a career spanning more than twenty years, he's been responsible for the graphic design of news and magazine programs; worked on special effects and computer graphics for commercials, and helped develop a corporate identity for the Austrian national TV station, ORF.
Hanzer's images evoke an eerie sense of motion arrested - as if the stillness existed even before the picture was taken.
Formerly with MetaDesign's Berlin office, where he worked with Erik Spiekermann, Martin Hospach has most recently established his own design office, nefas, with studios in Berlin and New York. Though primarily focussed on corporate design, nefas is also known for their skillful use of the computer to visualise information both technically and in an illustrative manner.
An established designer, Martin is very pragmatic, experimenting and pushing the boundaries with various ideas of what design could be.
Martin's fStop collection is one of the most diverse to date, featuring everything from relaxed people to sliced fingers.
Rian Hughes loves comics but hasn't made them in a while. Instead he's made just about everything else - typefaces and illustrations for ad campaigns, record sleeves, books and television. Based in London, Rian also recently created an animated in-flight safety movie, a collection of Hawaiian shirts, a series of watches, and a graphic novel. He's done poster campaigns for Eurostar and for a Japanese fashion company, and he recently made an award-winning brochure for the MTV European Music Awards.
Hughes doesn't make distinctions in the creation of type, illustration and graphic design - they appear almost as one from his pen. Rian's fStop contribution is a series of patterns and prints which were drawn rather than photographed. Drenched in colour and rich in texture, they could almost be wallpaper samples for a comic strip character.
'If it's arbitrary, take it out.'
See also: Device: file under: art, commercial by Rian Hughes
Jane Hutchison works at Research Studios London, as one of three designers under the creative direction of Neville Brody. Before joining Research, Jane graduated from Saint Martins Art College, London with a degree in graphic design and photography. She then worked on a series of design projects in the publishing and fashion industries.
Jane's fStop collection features a cross section of her work, characterised by its distinct colours, playfulness, and spontaneity. Nice.
Scott Kawczynski is an illustrator, photographer, and designer who made the move to New York City (well, Brooklyn actually) from Midwestern USA a few years ago to establish his own company, I-Formation Design.
Scott has worked extensively on music industry-related projects.
Chas Ray Krider's photography tells mysterious, erotic stories that you only think you've heard before. The energy and atmosphere of his work combines the cool of the French New Wave with the haunting beauty of David Lynch.
Chas Ray's new book, Motel Fetish, explores many of the same themes of lust, secrecy, isolation, sex and beauty captured in his collection for fStop.
Oliver A. Krimmel, a Stuttgart native, regards the graphic design profession as the best in the world; he enjoys applying the principles of design to many different aspects of life.
Oliver founded the design company i_d buero in 1992, and shortly thereafter established an artist collective known as Die Freischwimmer, all while playing in the band Dimmer. Recent projects include designing a dinner plate for the Design Centre in Essen, a typeface composed of human bodies, a book of Klaus Kinski's fever poems, and directing a movie about the 1980s.
Wolfgang Krolow is a widely published Berlin-based photographer best known for the social and political impact of his work. Having completed a degree in Visual Communication at the Academy of Art in Berlin in the early '80s, Wolfgang exhibited his insightful black-and-white photography across Europe, with gallery exhibits in Amsterdam, Brussels, Stockholm and Paris. His more recent books include Everyday in Albania, as well as a number of Berlin-oriented collaborations chronicling the social and political upheaval of the last forty years.
Wolfgang's fStop collection is timeless in its beauty and immediate in its message.
Andreas Labes is a Berlin-based photographer whose fStop collection captures a wide range of distinctly European themes. From the postmodern complexity of the urban metropolis to the landscapes of rural Europe, Andreas translates each motif to his singular, extraordinary vision.
Born in Erzgebirge, Germany, Andreas grew up in the former East German city of Frankfurt/Oder, situated near the Polish border. Since 1990 he has worked as a freelance photographer in Berlin, where his focus has been journalistic photography.
Melanie Lenz is inspired by the dynamic possibilities of interactive design. She creates elegant, transparent websites that allow the user to navigate intuitively through large amounts of material. Melanie's work is a testament to the adage that less is more - she eschews clutter and confusion while successfully conveying a sense of warmth and humour.
Born in Waiblingen, Germany, Lenz earned her degree in graphic design in Mannheim. Having completed a number of award-winning websites on a freelance basis, she recently joined xplicit! in their Berlin office.
Melanie's photographs for fStop are artfully arranged everyday situations. Almost exclusively people, slightly fuzzy, richly coloured and very relaxed.
'Innovative design is more than a pretty picture; it's the realisation of good ideas.'
Thomas Marecki (a.k.a.'Marok') is cult. He's best known for publishing and art directing lodown, the magazine of 'Bizarre skills, Cheap thrills and Xtreme entertainment' he founded in 1995. A veritable bible of skate-snowboard-graffiti culture, lodown filled a niche in the European market and is going strong six years later.
Marok has gone on to publish two compilation books, the first, Lodown Graphic Engineering, in 1998, and the second, Schizophrenic: Lodown Graphic Engineering Part II, in 2000. Both books are considered essential documentation of the lodown graffiti-drenched style. His typeface FF Tag Team 1 was published by FontFont in 1996. Marok was born in Berlin and lives there still.
'Question your manoeuvres twice a week.'
Tsilli Pines was born in Israel and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her collection for fStop consists mostly of Polaroids, and reflects her subject of greatest interest: people. At once playful and intense, "Two Minutes Later" depicts Tsilli and her friends in a world dense with colour and open to interpretation.
I shoot the things that are familiar to me: myself, the people in my life, my everyday environment. I want to see how much more I can learn about the things I think I already know.
Heidi Specker collaborated with her colleagues at Moniteurs to create the fresh, unaltered photographs which constitute 'Berlin' - a bit of a surprise coming from one of the first on the German scene to produce computer-manipulated photo art. Specker describes the pictures she's famous for as the opposite of architecture: The subjects begin as plans, become models, and then finally evolve into buildings. She then photographs and filters the buildings to reduce detail and depth, thereby returning the images to a 'model' state.
Moniteurs is a fifteen-person design studio in Berlin. Founded in 1994 by Heidi Specker, Heike Nehl and Sibylle Schlaich, the company specialises in catalogues and complex projects for corporations and cultural institutions. They 'create space,' both analogue and digital, depending on the objective.
'Imagine!'
Yujiro Tada reflects on his passions in an impressionistic glimpse of themes: spending time with family and seeing the beauty in the details of everyday life. Yujiro first started taking pictures in 1986, when his father gave him his first camera.
His fStop collection tells the story of Tada family life in an intimate yet universal way.
Jake Tilson is eccentric. How else does one describe a fascination for public bathrooms and a penchant for off-beat recordings: a 60-minute cassette tape of the rhythmic breathing of a sleeping three year old; a 60-minute recording of flight departure announcements at Heathrow Airport; and 'Found Sounds' - a compilation of musical tapes found on the streets of eight cities, played and re-recorded with background traffic sounds from each city?
Tilson has had a long career as an artist, graphic designer, fashion designer and filmmaker. In 1997 he was honoured with a 20-year retrospective of his work. His efforts to make the Web a more interesting place include 'The Cooker' - a site which opened to wide acclaim in 1995.
Jake Tilson lives and works in London.
'The true nature of cities appears in the detail.'
Eric Tsai's design work is often characterised by endless layering of sharp, precise forms. His night photography, however, takes a more austere approach. Eric's images for fStop depict a sense of urban isolation and sublimity.
More of Eric's design and photography can be found in the deep and wide experience of his personal designdamage site.
Winni Wintermeyer runs the San Francisco-based one-man operation 3 am. An accomplished designer and photographer, he frequently designs for the music industry (everything from A Minor Forest to Tom Waits). He recently contributed a selection of his photography to "New Photography," an exhibit at the San Francisco MOMA Artists Gallery.
Born in the industrial city of Bochum, Germany, Winni picked up design and photography in his early teens to publish a punk rock zine. Winni drinks way too much coffee and finds beauty in mundane environments. He often forgets everything he's learned and starts over from scratch, and believes that it is a good thing when accidents happen in his work.
Markus Wustmann can call himself a filmmaker, having completed the film 'Paulas Baum' (Paula's Tree). Born a quarter of a century ago in Leipzig, he lives there still (and in Bremen and in Hamburg). Since 1998 he has been art director for the German music and culture magazine Persona Non Grata. He is also a pop photographer and has directed music videos.
Wustmann is a partner in the graphic design and photography firm ansichtssache. His photographs for fStop are simply beautiful.
'Down a different river.'
Kevin Zacher creates culture. Intentionally or not, his photographs and their associated campaigns have captured the essence of a generation and been instrumental in defining it. Based in Salt Lake City, Utah, Kevin articulates in picture what eludes most in word, and although he doesn't philosophise about his own work, for many his work is their philosophy.
Zacher is the only fStop contributor who works solely as a photographer. His flexibility lies within the discipline; he varies technique and style to best bring out the personality and emotion of the subject. Kevin travels the world for photo-shoots and his growing list of clients reads like a youth culture top-20.
In the future Kevin Zacher would like to step beyond youth culture and find a broader market for his talents. His images for fStop are a mix of styles and subjects, colour and black & white, active and static - a good cross-section of his work.
Max Zerrahn visualises music. As co-owner of Rewika Records, he's versed in all the skills necessary to run a music label, from A&R and promotion to booking and label management, but it's in communicating musical atmospheres that he excels. Whether creating for CD covers, posters, or band photography, Max captures the essence of the music graphically.
During Zerrahn's apprenticeship in media design at a film production company, he did graphics, animation and editing for a number of commercials, music videos and feature films. He continues to do film-related projects on a freelance basis and recently shot documentary for a local artist and a music video for Tobacco, one of the bands on his label.
Max plays guitar in the Indiepop band Solarscape. His photographs for fStop show us that life is in the detail.
'There's no budget like low budget.'
|
Subscribe:
Contact Us