Taken from the book — Stu­dio Cul­ture: the Secret Life of the Graphic Design Stu­dio. This is a short­ened ver­sion of an inter­view with Erik Spiek­er­mann. Dur­ing the 1970s Spiek­er­mann worked as a free­lance designer in Lon­don before return­ing to Berlin in 1979 where, with two part­ners, he founded MetaDe­sign. In 2001 he left MetaDe­sign and started UDN (United Design­ers Net­work), with offices in Berlin, Lon­don and San Fran­cisco. Since Jan­u­ary 2009 he has been a direc­tor of Eden­spiek­er­mann, which employs over 100 peo­ple and has offices in Berlin and Amsterdam.

Unusu­ally among con­tem­po­rary design­ers, Spiek­er­mann has a sophis­ti­cated set of the­o­ries relat­ing to the lay­out, struc­ture and man­age­ment of design stu­dios. His the­o­ries have been exten­sively road-tested in the var­i­ous cre­ative enter­prises he has founded and run dur­ing a long career.

The inter­view was con­ducted in the offices of AIG, London.

Adrian Shaugh­nessy: You have a vision of your per­fect stu­dio. You’ve even got a name for it — The ‘Rund­buero’ Stu­dio (see dia­gram). Can you describe it?
Erik Spiek­er­mann: Ide­ally it’s a round space. It’s made up of three or four con­cen­tric cir­cles. At the cen­tre is a recep­tion area. This is where every­body enters. It is linked to the rest of the stu­dio by a cor­ri­dor. In the cen­tral recep­tion area are the peo­ple who answer the tele­phones, do the emails and make the pho­to­copies. It’s where all the machin­ery is — the print­ers, the espresso machine. Every­body has to go in here sev­eral times a day to pick up print­outs, pick up mail, get cof­fee and so on. Now, the fur­ther you go from the cen­tre the qui­eter it gets. Peo­ple in the outer rings have win­dows, oth­ers don’t. The walls are maybe only shoul­der height. If a sec­re­tary wants to see if I’m in the outer ring, she can get up and look across and see if I’m actu­ally there.
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The pre­vi­ous post showed that blog­ging from a phone still leaves a lot to be desired. But I still want to make the point that tech­nol­ogy shapes design. In this case it cre­ated a Claren­don (ca. 15mm tall) that doesn’t exist any­where else. Sim­i­lar effects can be seen with type that was pro­duced for other meth­ods of repro­duc­tion, from trans­fer type à la Letraset to wood type made for small presses that printed labels and signs for shops.

This naïve ren­der­ing of Claren­don is a good exam­ple for how the mate­r­ial makes the shapes.
Also an exam­ple for blog­ging from the iPhone, includ­ing what lit­tle photo edit­ing there is.

I’ve had a new platen press (the pre­vi­ous one burnt down in 1977) and a Kor­rex proof­ing press for a while now (see Proof­ing press upstairs). There is also quite a bit of type and every­thing else I need to start work; but I still haven’t printed any­thing. Mean­while, as reminder and inspi­ra­tion, here is a lovely video from the US show­ing busi­ness cards being printed on a platen press.

Kee­gan Mee­gan Press & Bindery from :::: MAGNETIC ARCHIVES :::: kiva on Vimeo.

Tilt­Shift pho­tos make every pic­ture look like a scene from a toy train cat­a­logue. As the iPhone will not take really good “real” pho­tographs, I pre­fer to apply effects like Tilt­Shift, even with an app that fakes the effect by apply­ing arti­fi­cial focus to over-saturated images. At least that gen­er­ates cool-looking pic­tures for on-screen use. This one shows the Gare de Lyon in Paris.

Some­body has taken the trou­ble and uploaded some extra mate­r­ial from the Hel­vetica DVD to You Tube:

Another col­umn from Blue­print mag­a­zine. I think it appeared in the novem­ber issue.
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While avoid­ing writ­ing my next col­umn for Blue­print mag­a­zine, I found the piece I wrote last year about the same topic, Japan. There is no other rea­son to pub­lish it here and now except the fact that I have it right in front of me now, an unfor­mat­ted text file.
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Novem­ber in Berlin doesn’t look so bad when it’s turned into a toy town, cour­tesy tilt/shift pho­tog­ra­phy.

All this twit­ter­ing has taken all my atten­tion away from my blog. Per­haps using the Word­press edi­tor on the iPhone will encour­age me to once again prop­erly pub­lish my obser­va­tions, find­ings and interventions.