Certain artefacts are not attributable to an artist, a designer, or an architect. I had always referred to those as apocryphal. Not anonymous, because the authors were known, but the results of their labours were not deemed worthy of a credit. What has been called secondary architecture is mostly apocryphal and responsible for the look and feel of our cities way more than ‘real’ architects would like to admit. Apocryphal work by publicly employed architects and designers ranges from street lights to bus stops, park benches, transformer kiosks and sewage works to paper forms, wayfinding systems and the corridors of hospitals and other public buildings. Work by these uncredited authors does not have to be inferior to that of celebrated artists, it is the conditions under which the work has been done that is different. A city architect will not get sued if a building he planned collapses. Not even his administration will get blamed, as they usually manage to find an outside supplier who will answer for any mistakes or shortcomings. By the same token, he will not have his name in the press, nor engraved on a brass plate. Lack of consequences, good or bad, seems to deny those projects that final kick, as if the designer simply could not be bothered to stay a little longer, try a little harder and fight for his concept.

Vernacular design just exists. It doesn’t win prizes nor get discussed by critics or praised by clients. We have always had a soft spot for the hand-painted signs for barbers in Africa, hand-written menus in little local restaurants and lovingly arranged gnomes in suburban gardens. But after ‘vernacular’ had become a household word in the Eighties, professional designers started exploiting naive ideas and images for their commercial work. Letters from handmade signs were scanned and made into designer fonts, overalls worn by railway workers became trendy city chic and the garden gnomes became part of postmodern architecture.

While you could look at this transfer of no-name designers’ work into the professional mainstream as straight-forward, inexcusable exploitation, you could also argue that it takes us out of our ivory towers and puts us back in touch with ordinary peoples’ aesthetic. Perhaps we can learn something from those who may have no ambitions to change the world of design as we know it, nor formal training. They probably wouldn’t even use the word ‘design’ for what they do. They just draw plans, paint signs and type on keyboards, using whatever software or fonts come with their cheap machine. We could learn that design, architecture, even art depends on natural talent as much as on academic training. Vernacular design also seems to work fairly well without knowledge of all the constraints and rules we are taught at schools and universities. I am not proposing that self-taught engineers start drawing up plans for nuclear power stations or that administrative assistants write and lay out forms for social security applicants. (Come to think of it, that’s what most of those forms in most countries look like.)

I do remember the one thing that attracted me to the vernacular: the joy of achievement that spoke through a lot of that work. Not because they were aware of having solved a major problem, saved humanity from starvation or reinvented their respective disciplines. But having witnessed an artifact made where none had existed before, the laypersons, the apocryphal designers, probably enjoy the results of their efforts more than we professionals do with all our knowledge of what went wrong, how good it could have been and how misunderstood our true genius generally is.

That brings me back to Las Vegas: nothing there will win a design prize. No building, no gaming console, no graphics. But millions of visitors come to the city that has no reason to exist, other than offering an uncomplicated way to get older by a few hours or days, while taking away our superfluous cash. Cheap weddings and divorces in a place that manages to quote all the styles ever built seems enough to attract more people than all the modern art museums ever will. Perhaps even now and again we need to go to Las Vegas to eat some humble pie.

Perhaps we Germans should be glad that we have created at least one world-famous and perhaps even popular style, but, know-alls that we are, we have to point out that the Bauhaus was much more than a simple style. Having been invented in Germany (if not entirely by Germans), it had to have a theory as well as a serious message to mankind.

Herbert Bayer paraphrased the Bauhaus proposition as ‘combining the areas of utilitarian design, after researching their constituent elements, under the purpose of “Bau” (German for building or construction)’. ‘Researching their elements’ meant discussing economical, social, formal and ethical topics to form a theoretical, scientific basis for design, in order to move away from personal, purely artistic attitudes. ‘Bau’ meant every artefact, not just buildings made from stone or steel.

One of the main problems with most of what we know about the Bauhaus (and other periods or styles, for that matter) is that we have only seen these artefacts filtered through some intervening technology: photographs of buildings; scans of book pages, more often than not reproductions of reproductions and hardly ever at the original size. This process tends to be kind to the printed pieces from the Bauhaus workshops. What was actually fairly crude typesetting from a very limited choice of fonts and plain letterpress printing on bad paper, today appeals to us as lovingly handmade, put together by charming, bespectacled gentlemen, sporting interesting facial hair-styles, under enameled lampshades in cosy mid-European ateliers. I bet the poor compositors who had to work to detailed sketches from designers such as El Lissitzky hated every minute of it. They would have much rather set straightforward columns of plain type instead of having to compose impossible illustrations from metal rules and 12-pica full points. At the same time it must have been frustrating for Lissitzky and his colleagues to have their imagination constrained by the tight limits of a mechanical craft that was more rule-based than the most Teutonic of engineers could have wished.

Crude as it was, this new way of constructing pages, rather than simply setting them from the top down and centred, soon created a demand. In 1928, Bayer observed that more than 50 per cent of the orders taken by printers in Frankfurt were specified to be set in the ‘Bauhaus Style’. By that time this had been reduced to big dots and heavy bars or, worse still, ornaments and imitations of nature by means of typographic materials. The original concept of being true to the material had come full circle.

If the Bauhaus concept had already been reduced to a mere style as early as 1928, while it was still going – perhaps even as strong as in the beginning – how can we be surprised that today a red bar is enough to evoke it? What would it mean today to be ‘true to the material’ when the material consists of invisible noughts and ones? How would we define ‘utilitarian design’ when we are supposed to invent experiences and virtual worlds for the consumer to get sucked into?

What’s left? Discussing economical, social, formal and ethical topics may well be desirable again when we design not just artefacts but processes, politics and, in fact, our future. Connecting these issues under the topos of design is what the Bauhaus invented. Creating networks, thinking across disciplines. What we call networks but tend to only get in the shape of cables is the way out for designers. The way out of their isolation, caught between clients asking for free pitches and competitors ready to do the same work for half the fee. The way out of the alienation and isolation caused by unlimited technology, which, by definition, is irresponsible.

If the red bar on my letterhead reminds me of this premise, I can live with the fact that, for most people, the Bauhaus is just another style.

When Japanese products first turned up in the West, they were cheap and generally not very challenging technically. Those were the days when Japanese companies would hide their identity behind English or better still, American-sounding names like Bridgestone, Panasonic, JVC, and NEC. A product from Japan was generally a poor imitation of the real thing and lacked originality. Price was the main feature, brand loyalty unlikely.

It was easy for the established brands to exploit widespread prejudice against Asian products and dismiss them as inferior. How could a country that nobody knew much about and that had been devastated by nuclear bombs possibly challenge western standards? Didn’t they all still sleep on the floor in wooden houses, eat rice out of wooden bowls and communicate with primitive brush strokes?

In the late Fifties, when they were first seen in the USA, Japanese cars looked like pocket-sized versions of large American models, fins and all. The first models did very badly in the USA. Pocket-sized, however, was the operative word: while in the US bigger was better, Japanese products always had to deal with the fact that a population of 100m has to live on a narrow coastal strip along a few rather small islands. Things made in Japan were small and kept getting smaller because a normal household there has as much space at its disposal as one car does in America. Japan has no natural resources, no room for landfills and a culture that doesn’t like ostentatious display of wealth. (The first facts may actually be the reason for the third). The opposite of Texas, as it were. Making things well and as small as possible seemed to be as natural to a Japanese engineer as over-engineering was to his German colleague. Where else would you find a book describing 101 ways to package an egg? The package itself was not seen as something merely to guarantee safe transportation, to be discarded at the end of that journey, but as serving its own aesthetic purpose.

It was in this spirit that in 1979 Sony introduced the first truly portable music player, the Walkman. It didn’t need to look like a traditional tape-recorder, because its purpose was to package music, not cassettes. It was also the first device that isolated its users from the world around them by introducing headphones as the only output for sound. Anybody who has ever travelled on public transportation in Tokyo will appreciate why that can be a blessing for both sides. With the Walkman, Sony had become a major global brand and a quality standard.

While Japanese products stood for mass production before, now they symbolized innovation. Suddenly, hitherto unpronounceable brands like Yamaha, Mitsubishi, Hitachi or Toyota not only became household names in the West, but also stood for premium brands that didn’t need to be cheap to sell. Some of the biggest Japanese companies still make products under western-sounding pseudonyms: Epson (Son of Electric Printer, really!) printers are made by Seiko Epson Corporation from Nagano, Roland synthesizers by Rorando Kabushiki Kaisha from Shizuoka and Bridgestone is still the trade name of Kabushiki-gaisha Burijisuton from Fukuoka. In other cases, the Japanese language provides a nice consonant-vowel pattern, making names like Nikon, Canon, Honda, and Nissan, sound pleasant and instantly familiar to western ears.

It has, however, taken Japanese brands a long time to be confident about their heritage. About 10 years ago, we worked with Lexus to reposition its brand in Europe. When we told the gentlemen who came to visit from Japan that it was a good idea if it owned up to being Japanese instead of pretending to be a pseudo-Mercedes of unknown origin, they thought we were quite mad. We showed them that Japanese qualities like modesty, precision and attention to detail produced cars that afforded the utmost luxury: the absence of stress. Luxury doesn’t have to mean ostentatious displays of gold chrome, but can also mean a Zen-like concentration on the essential. They never quite believed us, and it has taken Lexus another decade to arrive at the current positioning which is self-confident and relaxed.

Japanese brands don’t have to prove anything anymore. They are now imitated by those they tried to emulate 40 years ago. In a globalized world, only authentic brands will survive, and heritage has become a virtue, not something to hide. Cheap products now come from elsewhere. In a country without oil, gas or minerals, the human brain has become the most powerful resource. The lesson we can learn here in Europe is that progress is not about making more, but better.

We run our business by sharing responsibility among nine partners. Each of us run project teams. We do not take money from faceless networks and don’t have to be accountable to their controllers. We alone decide who we work for and how we organize ourselves. And we put our money where our mouths are: we are shareholders and interested in the long view.
Most design consultancies or branding agencies (pick your own name) offer pretty much the same type of work. It is how they go about their work that makes the difference. It is a question of attitude, personality, even morals.

The current crisis is also a crisis of values: are people accountable for what they do? Is success rewarded with fat premiums but failure paid for by society? Can we carry on asking for growth as the only way forward? Do we need new values?

Even designers are not only judged by the visible results of their work, but more and more so by how they achieved them. Originality, personality, accountability are new buzzwords. Attitude is more interesting than cleverness.

Brands are successful when they when they are authentic, when they show attitude. They show how they make products, how they treat their people, how they look at the future. Cheap stuff – the What – will still be made in China and elsewhere. Complex processes – the How – are designed here.

THESE DAYS, even cities and countries are branded like washing powder. When I hear a line like ‘London is the creative capital of Europe,’ (or was it ‘the World’?), the first thing I ask myself is whether this is the result of objective research, a tabloid invention or another government campaign to take peoples’ minds off increasing inflation, prohibitive property prices, terrible traffic and weird weather. Yet there is some truth behind the slogan. I live and work in Berlin, San Francisco and London, and there is something different about the British capital.

Berlin today is made up of many cities: the old Prussian capital, leftovers of Nazi pomposity, ruins from the War with patched-up bullet-holes on every surviving building, post-war capitalist planning in the West and socialist architecture in the East, plus 18 years of post-post-war developments. A history of disruptions. Low prices attract artists and would-be artists, but hardly any corporate headquarters or serious businesses. Nobody in Berlin has jobs, but everybody has ‘projects’.

London, on the other hand, is the product of centuries of continuity. Everything that has ever happened on the British Isles, from the Roman occupation to the days of the Empire, from Nazi bombing to Thatcher’s hardcore capitalism, has manifested itself in this city. You get to live in one of the centres of the known universe if you are prepared to put up with all the inadequacies, bad air, horrible traffic, atrocious services and ridiculous prices. If you survive in London, nothing will scare you. And having managed to do so is a great boost for anybody’s self-confidence. Walking (or, in mycase, cycling) through the streets of Clerkenwell, I notice that the average age of everybody out there must be half mine. The way they go about looking busy while stroking their iPhones, the fashion they pretend not to wear and the bars, cafes and restaurants they frequent all suggest that nobody earns their money making anything physical anymore. Which leaves ‘invisible earnings’ as their main contribution to the economy. That term was invented for the City, where people make their money by betting other peoples’ cash on anything that grows, flows or might one day be manufactured. However, the Square Mile turned out to be fuelled by greed more than by expertise, and the sex appeal has disappeared with the bonuses.

Enter the creatives. If we place anybody in this category who works in film, TV, publishing, advertising, fashion and design, we realise that practising these occupations poses no danger to anybody. In other words: if all the creative businesses went on strike tomorrow, we wouldn’t immediately notice. Electric power would still be generated, breads baked and concrete mixed. Trains might still leave platforms (which, looking at Britain from a German perspective, is a small miracle in itself), the Congestion Charge would be enforced, newspapers printed and hearts transplanted. But what of the newspaper features? The pictures? The different styles of headlines, the characteristic look of your favourite magazine? If you’ve ever been to a country without advertising (I used to live next door to Eastern Germany), you may have realised how drab everything looks, and developed a longing for even the most stupid washing powder advertisement.

Imagine, for a moment, a typical high street without any advertising at all. An attractive thought at first, until you realise that even neon signs and advertising hoardings deliver crucial information, perhaps decoration and sometimes even amusement. And who would want to go back to the undesigned objects from the past? The complexity of technology may need to be hidden from us for our own good, but the look and function of surfaces and interfaces cannot be left to the engineers and marketing people alone. Things may just about work without designers, but don’t we also derive pleasure from using objects, physically and aesthetically? Without fashion we’d all be forced to wear the same practical gear, Mao-style. Refreshing for some of us for a while perhaps, but every man knows what women are capable of if they haven’t bought a new pair of shoes for awhile. You get my drift: us creatives may not save lives, and mankind would certainly continue to exist without our involvement.

However, we have important roles to play. The first one is to put icing on the cake of capitalism, no doubt about that. The other one could befor us to use our unique talents to actually solve real problems. We can visualise thoughts, ideas, issues. That is a very powerful gift. Also, in spite of all the iPhoning, teleconferencing, button-pushing and Facebooking going on, we like to be around each other. The more creative talent you have in one place, the more you attract. We’re not afraid of moving into ‘bad’ areas, we like to try exotic foods, hang out with interesting people from faraway places, listen to strange sounds, read material that is incomprehensible to outsiders and generally treat bugs as features. Where could there be a better environment for this species than in London? One good thing about Britain’s colonial past is the fact that half the world speaks English as their first language, while the other half takes courses. Many smaller countries are already bilingual. Try learning Dutch or Swedish: impossible – they’ll always answer back in English. Still, nobody speaks it as well as you do here in Britain. If you could be bothered to learn another language, you could appreciate that there are other ways of seeing and saying things. If you could get your tongues out of your cheeks now and again, the contribution London makes to the creative trades, industries and businesses could be even greater. Nobody is asking you to become German and actually make things.

BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2008

Adrian as a colleague

He was the best of colleagues; he gave advice, discussed things, listened and had time for questions which a novice like me could barely formulate properly. At the annual ATypI meetings, which in those days were still pretty small, all the type designers knew one another. Most of them were connected to a manufacturer, who sold their typesetting machines as well as the typefaces that went with them. So the designers were really competitors, yet the atmosphere was friendly nevertheless, as is usually the case whenever specialists get together in a business as manageable as type design was at the time.

We met a little later in private at Walter Greisner’s, then head of D. Stempel AG, the type foundry within the Linotype group. In the small world of type designers there was no room for big egos, and as a friend of the house I was allowed to be on first name terms with my hero from the start. I had only just turned 30 and hadn’t yet designed my own typeface, but after having got to know Adrian I was determined to give it a go.

Univers 1957

Frutiger had just released a Linotype typeface named after himself, which he had originally developed for the signage at Roissy airport (now Charles de Gaulle). Nearly 20 years previously, in 1957, his Univers was released by Deberny & Peignot in Paris. The same year, by the way, that the Citroen DS was introduced – a similarly radical design. Helvetica, too, dates from this period. It was conceived as a commercial response to the success of the German Akzidenz Grotesk, which was highly rated by the Swiss designers due to its neutral robustness. The Neue Haas Grotesk, as Helvetica was first known, was from Münchenstein near Basel and was intended as a refinement (or simplification, if you like) of existing typefaces. Univers, on the other hand, was conceived as something new right from the start: as a system of complementary degrees of boldness and width forming a family of 21 weights. This incredible project, for which umpteen thousand steel punches had to be engraved (each character in each size), was the brainchild of a type designer from the Bernese Oberland who, not yet 30 years old, had been given free rein by his employer in Paris to undertake this enormous task.

This revolutionary type project breathed some fresh air into the Swiss design scene. Back then there were design factions which were not only classifiable by cities and schools, but also by their loyalty to certain typefaces. Soon there were not only Akzidenz Grotesk supporters, but also a Univers faction, not to mention the Helvetica community. Every typeface has its own design canon, thus for many designers the choice of typeface was at the same time a choice of direction. There were few choices of typefaces at the time, because apart from typesetting systems, the choice was dependent on the respective printers.

Munich 1972

Univers wasn’t accepted as readily as its Swiss half-sister Helvetica. However, it became a household name to all designers the world over during the Olympic Games in Munich in 1972. Otl Aicher and his team developed an image in which Univers played a leading role. Light, jolly colours and a precise but flexible grid helped the typeface make a unique appearance.

Roissy signage

At that time Frutiger was already busy working on the Roissy project. He had by then notched up some 20 years’ of experience in type design, and had passed from hot metal setting to photosetting and early digital methods of typesetting. He himself was aware of the flaws of Univers when it came to employing it for signage, which has different needs from those of a reading text on paper. Even though airports and train stations still use Univers on signs to this day, Frutiger realised back then that an entirely different kind of typeface was required. He once told me in the early ’90s that Univers wasn’t suitable for signage. At the time we were looking for a narrower version of Frutiger for the Berlin transport system signage, which didn’t yet exist in digitised form. So we had to digitise parts of the typeface ourselves, and have him give his blessing to a few introduced alterations. We also drew an Italic, because the typical Frutigerian slanted cut wasn’t distinctive enough for information on the Underground signs. Adrian would comment on the designs that I showed him by saying ”that’s not bad, but I would have done it differently”; both a go-ahead and a critique in one sentence. For fundamental reasons, he had never designed italic forms in the Roman tradition for his sans serif faces, preferring instead to make slanted versions of the upright cuts. However, for the new edition under the name of Frutiger Next, he let himself be convinced to produce a proper italic in order to meet the market demands, which looks a lot like our Transit Kursiv from 1991.

System with feeling

I know of no other typeface designer who can put so much feeling into a systematic approach. Frutiger’s typefaces are always planned, but they never look it. He developed number schemes for stroke width ratios and width proportions, yet never a priori by equation or interpolation, instead by feel for the right measurements. None of his designs were ever made to be bestsellers or classics, they were always made with the specific requirements in mind, usually demanded by the employer and only occasionally due to the desire to fit a particular genre. Adrian Frutiger long ago decided that he had contributed to every typeface classification and could only repeat himself. It’s a good job he at least let himself be convinced to oversee the new editions of his many classics, because modern technology allows all sorts of details which couldn’t be realised in his day.

Whoever fancies creating a typeface ought to know that we don’t design the black strokes, but the white spaces in between. Adrian Frutiger’s method of cutting shapes out of black paper using scissors and then sticking them together to make letters and characters can be traced, according to him, to the traditions of his native Interlaken. That’s what gave him the best tool – his intrinsic feel for inner and outer shapes, for rhythm, contrast, tension and consistency, and how to transform all these into shapes which are more than mere alpha-numeric characters.

What’s the best typeface in the world for the Latin alphabet? Frutiger, of course. It combines the talent of an unassuming designer who has devoted over fifty years to these little characters with the knowledge and experience of all the technology that has come and gone in that time. It is totally appropriate that this typeface, which started out as Concorde, bears his name today. It means that he stands alongside Garamond, Caslon, Bodoni, Gill and the other typeface designers who expressed and captured their epochs for posterity.

This homage is no doubt extremely embarrassing for him.

EK: Thanks for joining us today Erik. At smashLAB we’ve often admired your work. Needless to say, we’re happy that you are joining us for this little interview. I have certainly struggled with the sometimes divergent demands of running a design studio and working within it, and I believe that many of our readers have likely experienced the same. As such I’d be interested to hear about what you’ve learned, and how you run SpiekermannPartners.
It strikes me that you truly love design. As such, I wonder why you invest so much time in a business. Wouldn’t it be more enjoyable to downsize, hire a couple of assistants and have more time to do the work itself?
ES: I tried that when I left MetaDesign in 2000. But clients either thought I was still with that company 5 years later, or they thought I was too expensive for smaller projects, or they didn’t want to insult me by offering small projects. I would have been very happy designing book covers and other small stuff in an office with 2 or 3 people. But soon after I set up on my own with Susanna, my wife, I got enquiries from big companies again and had to hire other designers…
 
EK: Some describe me as a workaholic. When my wife and I moved in together this created some challenges. You seem to always be working and rarely are in one place for any length of time. (The other day I noticed that you post your itinerary in your email signature.) In light of these demands, how do you make time for those you love? Additionally, do you have any tips for those struggling to manage their time better?
ES: I have a bad history of neglecting my private life. One of the main reasons my first wife divorced me was the fact that business always took precedence over anything else. I have often had to leave her and my son in the middle of a vacation and go to see a client. In the end, I didn’t even have vacations anymore. Today I actually cancelled a trip to Korea to see the complete senior management of a big client there because my son and my grandson will be visiting me during that week. This is the first time I’ve ever done that, and we may lose the contract.
 
EK: Your firm has groups working in different locations across the globe, which would seem difficult to manage. Can you tell me a little about the how you track projects? Do you employ any software or project management systems that make this easier?
ES: We have a pretty good extranet and very efficient servers. We can log onto our VPN from anywhere with a fast connection and work off the servers. But it still needs people contact, both with clients and amongst each other. That’s why I travel so much.
 
EK: Budgets seem like a universally difficult topic for designers. I believe that the (often inaccurate) perception of design as “close to art” makes us squeamish when talking about money. If a company came to you needing a corporate identity system and website, what kind of ballpark budgets could they expect to find?
ES: Anything from 60k to 500k. If I write a proposal, clients will argue money with me, using that “artist” argument. So I get all the proposals written by project managers, and they get away with 30% more than I would. Amazing.
 
EK: What mistakes did you make at MetaDesign and how have they shaped how you run SpiekermannPartners?
ES: Too many to count. I certainly gave too much power to my new partners who had no experience in the business. I also didn’t always communicate what I was doing, why I was away so much or why a certain conference or presentation was important. In the end, they thought all I did was look after my hobbies. Now that I’m gone, Meta survives mainly because it’s a big brand. Maybe some people have finally understood what it takes to build a big design brand.
 
EK: The last time I checked, your firm was at 40 members and growing. How do you ensure the quality of work remains consistent? Additionally, how much “Erik Spiekermann” do clients get when they hire SpiekermannPartners?
ES: We’re not quite that many, but almost. Clients get my initial input and my involvement all the time. I am very quick to understand the issues and I am also pretty good about delegating the design work after we have identified the way to go. I look at all the presentation, and I usually present the most important phases myself. But the main thing is to hire good people who are better at some things than I am. And you have to understand that delegating means giving up. You cannot let a team work on a project for weeks without ever seeing what they’re up to and then, at the end, tell them that their work sucks. My former partner used to do that, and in the end, nobody wanted to work with her anymore.
 
EK: How do you illustrate the value of SpiekermannPartners design solutions to clients? Or, does your recognition in the community allow you to tap into a client-base that is already aware of such value?
ES: No. You always have to tell the same story. Especially when you won’t do pitches. We never do unpaid creative work, but sometimes it takes more time and trouble to convince them than to do the work. But it’s a principle. We often have clients come back after they initially hired somebody else, because they were cheaper or did a free pitch. In the end we know that our approach is better for the client, but they need to find out for themselves sometimes.
 
EK: You direct a relatively large design firm. With such an organization, the burn-rate on cash often forces principals to look for more lucrative work to sustain the firm’s health. Which clients do you find to be the most profitable to work with? How do you prospect such groups?
ES: Big, long-term projects are best because you get up to speed with it and start making economies of scale. They are boring, but good cash cows. You also need small, interesting projects to keep the designers hungry, even if they lose money. A balance is important.
 
EK: Professional services firms are usually challenged by the paradox of billable hours. Often, the design solution has a disproportionately great value compared to the time worked. As such, some agencies have proposed the notion of “licensing” ideas. Do you still bill on the hour, or do you have an alternate method of charging for your services?
ES: We always stick to our proposals which are based on time spent. If we take too long, we lose, if we take less time, we win. We do make licensing deals for exclusive typefaces, and we have some jobs with bigger clients that are entirely charged on an hourly basis, but only after a long relationship, where they know they can trust you. Clients can have access to our extranet and the time-sheets if they demand it.
 
EK: Many firms reference industry erosion, limited budgets, difficult client relationships, and a myriad of other issues as obstacles to strong design solutions. What do you feel stands in the way of your firm doing even better work?
ES: Young, know-all MBAs who avoid risk because they don’t want to endanger their career prospects. In the end, they do endanger their careers by becoming totally interchangeable.
 
EK: Often it seems that strong designers find difficulty in directing others. Are you a good manager? What lessons have you learned about this aspect of your business?
ES: I am good at inspiring other designers. I am not very good at the daily aspects of running a business. That’s why I have other people who do that for me. I’m best when I improvise, which makes it difficult for our people sometimes to work with me. I’m a Gemini and German: always on time, but sometimes a year late.
 
EK: Aside from the obvious reasons, such as portfolio and past experience, what do you look for in the designers you hire? Is there a particular characteristic that you find in those who excel at SpiekermannPartners?
ES: Attitude. Curiosity. And at least one skill that is particular to that person.
 
EK: What is the culture at SpiekermannPartners? How do you maintain this spirit as the organization grows?
ES: Leave people to do what they do best. And provide the best espresso machine in the street, the fastest servers in the business and the most comfortable chairs.
 
EK: What aspects of your personality are liabilities to your business? How do you overcome these weaknesses?
ES: I tend to lose interest quickly. My boredom threshold keeps going lower over the years. And I’m not really interested in money. Clients sense that. I also can hardly ever say no. Not to interviews, presentations, lectures, big projects, favours, time-wasters, public duties, freebie projects.
 
EK: Does the “business” aspect of your practice enhance or diminish your capabilities as a designer?
ES: Without it, I wouldn’t be around as a designer. I started a few businesses (like MetaDesign and FontShop), and they’ve all been successfull. You also have to design a business, and that process is very much like working for client projects.
 
EK: Do you employ others with strong traditional business skills to help plan and manage the growth of SpiekermannPartners? If so, can you tell us a little about the roles they fill and what you gain from these relationships?
ES: We have a freelance controller, 2 project managers and an office manager. They look after proposals, the day-to-day running of the business, our efficiency. I still tell them what equipment we’ll buy and who we should hire and when.
 
EK: You are highly regarded in the design community, which is quite nice to see given how pragmatic your work is. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen you rely on sensationalism or shenanigans to build your reputation. However, does all of this press and attention result in more–or better–work for you and your firm?
ES: Not really. Clients are hardly ever part of our design scene. But it makes me feel good being liked by most of my peers. I have many friends in the business, and we see each other more as colleagues than as competition. I need that moral support.
 
EK: Thanks once again for the interview. In closing, are there any last thoughts that you might like to share? Or, do you have any suggestions for designers considering starting their own firm?
ES: Just the usual: do what you’re good at and avoid what you’re not good at. Don’t talk about stuff you do not know about. Even harmless clients will have a bullshit detector and know when you’re out of your depths. Travel and learn. And ask whenever you don’t know something. It is my greatest fear to die stupid.

Pitched out

A pitch is the presentation of design ideas to a client by competing agencies or studios, usually for free.

I keep reading ?(…) won the project (…) after a pitch…? Won? A pitch is the presentation of design ideas to a client by competing agencies or studios. The Americans pitch a baseball, while the English noun denotes a black, sticky substance that is difficult to get off your hands. That stuff is called Pech in German, and we use the same word for bad luck. I love etymology! Bad luck indeed for those who don’t win a pitch. Clients invite designers to a pitch when they think they need help with a communication problem, and the fee usually doesn’t even cover the cost of the colour prints. That would be like visiting several restaurants in a row and trying the food in each one, then refusing to pay the bill because none of the dishes were really to your liking.
Taking part in a pitch where concepts are sold for a fraction of what they are worth, in other words: given away, makes you a loser three times over. First you lose any respect for our business, because if it can be given away, it can’t be worth much. Then you lose money by not being paid for your most valuable asset: ideas and their visualization. And finally, you lose any chance to show the client that it takes a dialogue to solve design problems. A pitch is like a blind date with many partners at the same time. A client who invites designers to a pitch without first talking to them properly, at length and in depth, might as well draw lots among the members of a professional association. And if a client does engage a few designers in a dialogue about the issue, he won?t need a pitch any more. He’ll know who to trust.
Why then do more and more clients think that pitching is the way to go, and why do so many designers take part? It seems that Stupidity, Laziness, Vanity and Cowardice — the four Riders of the Design Apocalypse, drove Reason, one of the patron saints of design, to a blackout; a pitch black one, so to speak.