An inter­view by email; Decem­ber 2003.
A remark about the form of this entry (and many oth­ers):
Most of them have sim­ply copied out of emails. That results in lower case writ­ing (mostly and not very con­sis­tently), wrong apos­tro­phes, wrong hyphens and wrong quote marks. Too bad, but inevitable in inter­na­tional cor­re­spon­dence. Prag­matic, not righteous.

’ ≠ ’ |  — ≠ –  |  —  ≈  –  | ” ≠ „ | ” ≠ ”

1. What is your pro­fes­sion?
type and typo­graphic designer

2.What Col­lege did you attend (if any)?
Freie Uni­ver­sität Berlin

3. Do you feel that your school­ing played a big part in your deci­sion to become a designer?
nope (is that bet­ter than a plain no?)

4. What is your favorite car, and why?
my NSU Ro80; i’ve had it for 1985 (it’s a 1977 model); it was the first sedan with a Wankel (ie rotary) engine and the first car to be designed to a wedge shape (see photo).

5. In a short para­graph, describe how you became inter­ested in design.
i was a printer and type­set­ter, but my shop burned down in 1977. So i ended up mak­ing sketches (which i had also been doing as a type­set­ter) and giv­ing them to a pho­to­set­ter instead.

6. Do you feel that design is art? Why or why not
of course it isn’t. A designer visu­al­izes a client’s issues, prob­lems, brief. An artist his own. Design­ers and artists use artis­tic means to show their con­cepts and design­ers also use intu­ition. Thus the con­fu­sion. But if i wanted to work like an artist, i would have become an artist and not a designer. I also use sci­ence more than an artist would.

7. Where do you see design in the next five years?
ques­tions like this are silly because even if i had any idea, i wouldn’t be stu­pid enough to pre­dict the future. Any­thing can happen.

8. Serif or sans serif? (and why)
Both, what­ever fits the pur­pose. If i designed more books or news­pa­pers, i’d use more ser­ifs. As i design a lot of infor­ma­tion sys­tems, i use more sans — less noise (and i haven’t designed a real serif face yet)

9. Are there any design­ers that you look to for inspi­ra­tion on your own work?
my col­leagues in the office and wher­ever i meet them

10. If tomor­row your life depended on the loss of either your eyes or you arms, which would you pre­fer to give up?
my arms. I could always use some­one else’s, but not with­out my eyes.

Bonus Ques­tion.
Were you really told to “stop steal­ing sheep,” or is that a watered down ver­sion of what was said for letter-spacing all caps?
fred­er­ick goudy said that “men who would let­ter­space lower case would shag sheep’, as that was (and is) con­sid­ered a car­di­nal sin by typog­ra­phers. Let­terspac­ing caps, how­ever, is done and should be done generously.