shoot in Greece. Myths become dreams, dreams become goals, goals become reality. But then it is time to watch out for new opportunities. Even adventurous advertising campaigns can become a routine affair, unless you introduce something new from time to time. Your style and way of handling design & typography is very unique. How did you arrive at that way of doing things and why? I was trained in a very modernist way at the College of Design, Schwäbisch-Gmünd, Germany, an offspring of the famous (or infamous?) Ulm School of Design. Everything was logical, had to be rationalized, intellectually analyzed and justified. But how do you rationalize atmosphere and poetics without suffocating it. The Royal College of Art in London, UK, was the polar opposite of Gmünd: liberal, student-led, non-dogmatic. It shares a lot of characteristics with Glasgow School of Art, actually. I felt quite lost half way through my MA. I had lost track of my agenda. I remember traveling to Paris in my summer break to meet Gerard Paris-Clavel from Ne Pas Plier in order to talk to him about my dissertation subject. But the meeting was cancelled. So I went to the Centre Pompidou instead to see a Picasso exhibition. There was one piece of work that puzzled me, a sculptural sketch
aimed at a piece of work in tribute to Guillaume Apollinaire. This was very different from Picasso’s other works. When I sat in the museum café afterwards, I felt inspired by Picasso’s three-dimensional assembly of mostly straight lines, I started scribbling a font, imagining it to be three-dimensional. This was the typeface I later called Futura. I first created physical prototypes cast in resin, and then rendered it digitally. I did not do it for any purpose other than to demonstrate that it is rather easy it is to do something out of the ordinary. But I remember Gert Dumbar, who was Visiting Professor at the RCA at the time, being really fond of this interim project of mine. So creating three-dimensional typefaces became a bit of a hobby. When I worked for Pentagram Design, in 2001-2003, I would spend the days in the office, and return home to fiddle with three-dimensional fonts during the evenings and during weekends. A commission to create a music video provided an opportunity to explore possible applications of the typography work in 2003. This was the start of my independent, perhaps slightly unusual, typography art and design practice.
