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1By Adrian Shaughnessy

Moving Pictures

Being a movie buff and a graphic designer can be painful. Posters for most Hollywood fi lms are dismal and formulaic and rarely show us anything beyond the state-of-the-art dental work and gym-tooled torsos of their stars. This is hugely disappointing. Cinema is the preemi-nent art form of the modern era, so why should fi lm posters be as crass as they are?

According to Corey Holms, a Los Angelesbased designer who spent over ten years working on movie posters and other promotional material, this sorry state can be explained by the marketers who believe that the role of the poster is to be all things to all people. Decision by committee means that we get something no one particularly likes.

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Studio marketing departments are not the only culprits. The demands of rapacious agents and ego-tistical stars handicap poster design from the start. Their insistence on hierarchical billing and micro-management of credits ensure that most posters end up as typographic quagmires.

Of course, there is still great work being done. The posters of Neil Kellerhouse have a poise and elegance in stark contrast to the hyperventilating excess of most Hollywood offerings. Its not hard to see why Kellerhouse is the designer of choice for smart, youngish directors keen for posters that match the aesthetic integrity of the fi lms they direct, such as David Fincher (The Social Network) and Casey Affl eck (Im Still Here). When you factor in Kellerhouses DVD covers for Criterion, its clear that his work ranks with the best graphic design in any area.

Meanwhile, the emphatic illustrations of another contemporary, Akiko Stehrenberger, offer an echo of the great fi lm posters of the past. Her work may lack the elemental power of Saul Basss image-making for Vertigo and The Man with the Golden Arm, but Bass was working at a time when the poster was king, whereas today it is only one of many vehicles the fi lm companies use to reach the public. Yet Stehren -bergers designs for the Coen brothers A Serious Man and Lisa Cholodenkos The Kids Are All Right show that it is still possible to design posters for a mass audience without resorting to the banalities of Hollywood hype.

The poverty of most movie posters, however, has had a hugely enjoyable side effect. A growing number of graphic designers are fi ghting back by designing their own posters. These self-initiated works, often made to be sold online, dispense with the tedious conventions imposed by marketing departments and make bold use of quirky illustration, understated color, and typography, unhampered by fl ames, go-faster stripes, or other lurid enhancements.

Two Brazilian graphic designers, Pedro Vidotto and Eduardo Prox, have caused a stir in the blogosphere with their hard-boiled reimagined posters for famous movies. Vidotto uses recognizable graphic elements from the fi lms he selects (David Carradines eye patch and Uma Thurmans samurai sword from the Kill Bill movies, or the tractor marks left by

The poverty of most mmoovviiee pppooosstttttttttttttttttteeerrrsss,, however, has had a hhhhuuggeellyy eennjjooyyaabbllee side effect. A growinnngg nnuummmbbeerr ooff graphic designers arrree fifi gghhttiinngg bbbaaaccckk..

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Wall-E) and renders them in stark silhouettes. Prox is equally austere in his approach, but his use of imagery is more tangential and oblique, asking forcontemplation: A stark Clockwork Orange poster usesa silhouette of a cog wheel to suggest a clock but alsoechoes the famous eye makeup of the fi lms criminal protagonist. This vein of illustrative imagery iscarried still further by Moxy Creative, which produceda set of posters that use illustrations of clothing toencapsulate fi lmsan airmans leather fl ying jacketfor Top Gun, and a pair of disembodied suspenders, astiff white collar, and wrist cuffs for Wall Street.

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While these alternative posters doubtlessly provide creative nourishment for the people who design them, Im not convinced that they would work as fi lm advertisements. There is a sense in which they are wise after the event.

Would an illustration of an eyeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeepatch really persuade people toooooooooooooooooo llllyyyyy ppppeeeeerrrrrssssuuuuuaaaaadddddeeee ppppppeeeeeeooooooopppppppllllllleeeeee ttttttttttpay to see KKKKiiiilllllll BBBBiiilllllll???? lllllll

Yet perhaps these examples of compressed graphic expression have a role to play in the evolution of movie watching. As cinema increasingly becomes an online activity, and as our decision to watch a fi lm becomes based, at least partly, on thumbnail versions of movie posters on download sites, perhaps these unoffi cial postersa sort of underground yin to Hollywoods yanghave become our online guides. While mainstream Hollywood posters, with their overelaborate, cram-it-all-in ethos, suffer when reduced to thumbnail size, the new minimalist miniposters thrive in the terrain of bits. Its unlikely that this was the aim of the artists when they made their posters, but they might just be setting the stylistic pace for the future.

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1/ PARIS, TEXAS (DVD RELEASE)DESIGNER: NEIL KELLERHOUSE; CLIENT: THE CRITERION COLLECTION

2/ FUNNY GAMES (THEATRICAL RELEASE) ILLUSTRATOR & ART DIRECTOR: AKIKO STEHRENBERGER; CREATIVE DIRECTOR: JON MANHEIM; CLIENT: WARNER INDEPENDENT

3/ LIFE DURING WARTIME (THEATRICAL RELEASE) ILLUSTRATOR & ART DIRECTOR: AKIKO STEHRENBERGER; CREATIVE DIRECTOR: ANDREW PERCIVAL; CLIENT: IFC FILMS

4/ A SERIOUS MAN (UNUSED POSTER) ILLUSTRATOR & ART DIRECTOR: AKIKO STEHRENBERGER; CREATIVE DIRECTOR: ANDREW PERCIVAL; CLIENT: FOCUS FEATURES

5/ THE THIN RED LINE (DVD RELEASE)DESIGNER: NEIL KELLERHOUSE; CLIENT: THE CRITERION COLLECTION

6/ ANTICHRIST (DVD RELEASE)DESIGNER: NEIL KELLERHOUSE; CLIENT: THE CRITERION COLLECTION

7/ IM STILL HERE (THEATRICAL RELEASE)DESIGNER: NEIL KELLERHOUSE; CLIENT: MAGNOLIA PICTURES

8/ THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE (THEATRICAL RELEASE)DESIGNER: NEIL KELLERHOUSE; CLIENT: MAGNOLIA PICTURES

9/ AND EVERYTHING IS GOING FINE (THEATRICAL RELEASE)DESIGNER: NEIL KELLERHOUSE; CLIENT: IFC FILMS

10/ THE SOCIAL NETWORK (THEATRICAL RELEASE)DESIGNER: NEIL KELLERHOUSE; CLIENT: COLUMBIA PICTURES

11/ SOMEWHERE (UNUSED POSTERS) ART DIRECTOR & DESIGNER: AKIKO STEHRENBERGER; CREATIVE DIRECTOR: ANDREW PERCIVAL, CLIENT: FOCUS FEATURES

12/ 500 DAYS OF SUMMER (UNUSED POSTER) ILLUSTRATOR & ART DIRECTOR: AKIKO STEHRENBERGER; CREATIVE DIRECTOR: ANDREW PERCIVAL; CLIENT: FOX SEARCHLIGHT 13/ PULP FICTIONPEDRO VIDOTTO

14/ KILL BILLPEDRO VIDOTTO

15/ WALL-EPEDRO VIDOTTO

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The Cargo Chain: Workers Who Make Our Economy Move, is the second pamphlet/

poster in CUPs Making Policy Public series. One side shows where the most shipping

containers enter and leave the country. The other side (inset) explains the global ow

of goods, and charts the journey of an iPod from the factory to the store.

By Lisa Selin Davis

PUBLIC POLICY SHAPES OUR LIVES, BUT FEW UNDERSTAND HOW IT WORKS. JUST IN TIME FOR ELECTION SEASON, ONE ORGANIZATION IS COMING TO THE RESCUEWITH DESIGN.

DONT WORRY ABOUT THE GOVERN-MENT

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Photograph by Sasha Nialla

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LAST SPRING, PENTAGRAM PARTNER Michael Bierut and Cooper Union professor Doug Ashford sat together on a design jury. Nothing strange about that, except, maybe, for the jurys other members: Damaris Reyes, executive director of the neighborhood housing and preservation organization Good Old Lower East Side, and Andrea Batista Schlesinger, executive director of the Drum Major Institute for Public Policyhardly your usual design judges. The group convened at the behest of an unusual organization, the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP)a nonpro t based in Brooklynto sort through proposals from advocates, organizations, and researchers in a range of elds for complex policy issues that need visual explanation. CUP and its jury were preparing to explain public policy, using design.

Plumbing the depths of convoluted policies while presenting them beautifully might seem daunting, but CUP does it every day. Its mission is to bring designers, architects, policy wonks, and social-issue advocates together to make educational projects that help people understand and shape where they live, explains Rosten Woo, CUPs executive director. Their exhibitsheld in gal-leries and museums across the countryuse models, drawings, and diagrams to explore such topics as the connection between the ow of money and the built environment, the history of building codes, and the link between abandoned buildings and the homeless.

In 2005, CUPs interest in visually explaining socially relevant subjects led them to explore one of this countrys most fraught pol-icy issues: Social Security. Damon Rich, CUPs founder, an educator with architectural training, had started by pondering a typically abstruse con cept for a CUP exhibit: risk management. This was postSeptember 11, and, Rich says, risk had become a part of every conversation. At that time, George Bush was pushing his proposal to save the pro gram through privatization; suddenly, Social Security seemed like CUPs entry into the topic, since the programs goal is to spread the risk of latter-life poverty across generations.

Rich engaged two of his colleagues, Sam Stark, an editor at Harpers magazine, and David Reinfurt, founder of the design rms O R G and Dexter Sinister, and set about analyzing Social Security. We were surprised at the programs elegance, says Stark. It medi-ates between the very abstract world of money and the stock market, government programs, and our daily lives. It wasnt as bad or bro-ken as Bush would have had everyone believe, either. The only way his proposal could get traction at all was because people had no clue how Social Security worked, says Rich.

So they decided to give people a clue. We wanted to do a small project that was distributable, says Rich. The idea was to use any design means necessary to make something that was otherwise off-putting accessible, so people can feel they have an opinion, rather than defer to the experts. The team created a pamphlet, Social Security Risk Machine, lled with Otto Neurathesque gures and charts, that folds out into a poster that features an excerpt from Franklin Delano Roosevelts speech upon signing the Social Security Act in 1935. With mapped-out out nuances like indexed monthly

For The Cargo Chain, longshoreman Tony Pearlstein created these prototype maps to track connections between local and international ports.

m a p s b y t o n y p e r l s t e i n

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earnings (the fair total of your lifetime earnings), the piece is text-heavy, but its full of little plot twists that can draw in even the most uninformed reader: Who knew that regardless of your annual salary,only $90,000 of your wages is tapped for Social Security?

Because the issues are so complex, the team opted for pared-down design: a two-color process of black and Pantone 363 green, sans-serif Avant Garde Gothic type, and easy-to-decode pictograms. We kept it looking very accessible, even if it takes work to get through the diagrams, says Reinfurt, who honed the pamphlets design with plenty of input from Los Angeles-based designer Mark Owens and from Rich. They chose a printed piece rather than a web-based one because, says Rich, there is a power and attention that people would give to a print piece that they wouldnt give to a website.

While Rich and company wanted the pamphlet to be digestible by a wide-ranging audience, it was also intended to be something that art enthusiasts could enjoy. When 1,500 pamphlets were nally printed in 2006, they reached the best-seller list at New Yorks art-focused bookstore Printed Matter.

Whether the pamphlet in uenced support for Bushs proposal remains unknown. By the time the piece was printed, Bush had abandoned the plan. But CUPs critical success spurred the organ-ization to make the pamphlet the rst in a series called Making Policy Public, where social-issue advocates could partner with designers to produce visual explanations of complicated policies, global and local.

CUPs second pamphlet was, in some ways, both global and local, with a much more targeted audience. It was also, arguably, a more direct piece of activism. Tony Perlstein, a longshoreman who is a longtime friend of many of CUPs boardmembers, was already work-ing on a visual organizing tool for his fellow dockworkers, who were suffering from the effects of slashed wages, declining medical bene ts, and the threat of obsolescence by auto mation. We were attempting to [show] where longshore workers power lies by map-ping out where containers come into and travel throughout the U.S., he says. CUP paired Perlstein with cartogra pher Bill Rankin

and the design rm Thumb to create The Cargo Chain: Workers Who Make Our Economy Move. Perlstein and Mark Brenner, the director at Labor Notes, a labor issues journal, sup plied the initial text, data, and a roughed-out map. Working with Thumb and Rankin, they re ned that information, and charted howand how manycommod ities get from the factory to the sales oor, as well as explaining global shippings evolution from the perspectives of the stevedores, the ship owners, and express-mail delivery people.

The pamphlets panels open to a map of North America, on which the most active and in uential ports are represented by orange circlesthe larger the circle, the larger the amount of goods han-dled, and the more potential power should longshoremen strike ina coordinated fashion. If you shut down New York, goods can just as easily ow through Norfolk, explains Perlstein. Youve got to shut down Norfolk, too. Embedded within the map are pop-outs of successful actions like the Longshore Lockout of 2002, when West Coast dockworkers successfully struck to win a better contract. It shows how large and expansive and complex the system is, but that its still fragile; it shows what individuals can do, says Rankin.

The project itself, however, was very much about what groups can do. We wanted an environment where the product wasnt driven sole ly by either party, says Rich. For the designers, that meant more collaboration than anyone was used towhich led to moments of both grace and frustration. Ive never worked with that many peo-ple at one time, Rankin admits. The project took eight months instead of the three theyd scheduled. Wed take a stab at it and theyd all look at it and tell us it didnt work, says Thumbs Jessica Young. Gradually, we arrived at something that we all loved.

More than 10,000 posters were printed and distributed at long-shoremens meetings, to Labor Notes readers, and in union halls from Mobile, Alabama, to Long Beach, California. Fatih Shakir, a Miami longshoreman and member of the board of directors of the International Longshoremens Association, distributed 400 to the members of ILA Local 1416. When it comes time for contract negotiations, now well all be of one accord, he says.

i l l u s t r a t i o n b y r y a n q u i g l e y

This chart shows the way in which projects in the Making Policy Public series come to fruition, from the time when social advocates submit briefs, to the point when

designers and advocates create a pamphlet together.

The idea was to use any design means necessary to make something that was otherwise off -putting accessible, so people can feel they have an opinion, rather than defer to the experts.

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With two prototypes under its belt, CUP decided to expand the projects reach. In May, the judging panel that included Bierut and Ashford sifted through 30 requests. The challenge was to pick proposals that were complicated enough to bene t from visualiza-tion, but not so complicated that they de ed visualization, says Bierut. Rich con rms that a certain level of complexity was key: This is not just, We need a nice poster that tells people to get their cats spayed.

Requests came in for visual explanations of New York Citys bud get, zoning, and immigration patterns, among many other topics. The jury nally settled on four: Predatory Equity Takeover of Affordable Housing; Detention and Deportation (about the con -se quences for immigrant detainees of pleading guilty to a crime); New York City street vendor regulations; and discrimina tory barriers for formerly incarcerated job seekers.

The jurys next task, with which they were still busy as PRINTwas going to press, was to choose designers to work on collaborative teams for these projects, the rst of which will be completed by De cember. As the Making Policy Public initiative continues, CUP will manage the collaborations and oversee the design process. But mostly, theyre now in the matchmaking business, design-policy yentas. Were moving away from designing or creating content to creating successful part nerships, says Rich. Thats an expertise all its own.

Folded out, the pamphlet Social Security Risk Machine displays a quotation from President Roosevelts speech on signing the Social Security Act in 1935. Other panels describe where Social Security gets most of its revenue (payroll taxes); who is eligible to receive bene ts; and how certain changes could affect the program.

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By Alice Twemlow

n e u e b e r l i nLong de ned by the cut-and-paste club y posters

of the 90s, Berlin design has grown up and

gone globalbut its keeping its independent spirit and

connection to the street.

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FONS

Opposite page: As part of an inverted signage system guiding people to a series of events organized by fashion label Bless, a marque made up of white stripes was applied within a variety of different scales and contexts, including plastic shopping bags. Design firm: Rocket Scientists Breakfast; designer: Manuel Raeder; photographer: Stefan Korte; event organizer: Yasmine Gauster. This page, top: A poster for an exhibition of Alexander Schrders collection of contemporary art responds directly to the physical form of his archive, which includes all the ephemera and personal correspondence related to each artist. Design firm: Rocket Scientists Breakfast; designer: Manuel Raeder. This page, above: Poster for an exhibition of work by the design firm cyan held in 2006 at Galarie Anatome, Paris. Design firm: cyan. This page, left: As part of a promotional campaign for Bl anks clothing store, T-shirts were taped to hoardings around the city. Design firm: Double Standards; designer: Chris Rehberger.

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One bitterly cold and gray morning last January, Berlin graphic designer Manuel Raeder could be seen on a small street in the citys Mitte district, hard at work installing what he calls an inverted signage system for Bless, a luxury fashion label. Known for experimental products such as a visor with a hairpiece attachment and a hammock made of mink fur, Bless had inserted some of its unusual wares into the other establishments along Mulackstrasse. It had also hired a van to sell coffee and a man with a grill attached to his waist to walk up and down the thoroughfare selling bratwursts. In collaboration with his avant-garde client, Raeder had devised some signage to nudge people toward the motley activities on the street. His sign, a transparent sticker printed with white stripes, was enigmatic to say the least. Seen in multiple, though, it began to make sense.

Stuck on lampposts and graffitied walls all over the neighboring streets, Raeders striped motif formed a trail of bread crumbs lead-ing people to Mulackstrasse, where they encountered a profusion of the white stripes at a variety of scales. Some filled entire store windows, and some were on banners above them. Raeder had also tied translucent supermarket bags overprinted with the white stripes along a stretch of fencing. Each of the bags, arranged in a composition that was gridlike but just slightly askew, contained a black-and-white map of the vicinity that pointed out where Bless products could be found as well as other places of interest. [The signage system] only made sense at its destination, so it did the opposite of what most systems do, explains Raeder. It inverted the conventional wisdom of branding, too: Because the stickers were not marked as Blesss per se, it meant the other stores could insert their own postcards and flyers beneath them.

Raeders lo-fi, conceptual approach to creating this subtle street event is typical of the design emerging from the studios of todays Berlin, which is to say it has nothing to do with the stereotype of Berlin design to date. Berlin design has been portrayed as rough-and-ready, adolescent and introspective, a quirky by-product of the citys legendary club and fashion scenes, and infused with the visual language of a long-past era of political turbulence. Such a view is outdated, however. The current generation of designers does feedoften unconsciouslyon the visual heritage of their city, but they temper their predecessors agitprop aesthetic with restraint and new ideas obtained from a larger, more global spectrum of reference.

My work is the same wherever we are based, be it Stuttgart, Frankfurt, London, or Berlin, says Chris Rehberger, founder of the firm Double Standards, located in Berlin for the past six years. Similarly, Raeder, who before settling in Berlin had worked in London, the Netherlands, and Mexico City, sees no connection between location and the output of his studio. His references and touchpoints come from beyond, rather than from within, Berlin: Most of the people we work with are from abroad, all the people in the studio are from abroad, and most of the work we do gets shown abroad, he says. And even though she has lived and worked

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Opposite page, top: An identity design for the Bavarian State Opera uses a visual language of contemporary signs and symbols such as corporate logos and traffic signs to project the stories from its operas. Design firm: Fons Hickmann m23; designers: Gesine Grotrian-Stein-weg, Fons Hickmann, Markus Bsges. Opposite page, bottom: Poster promoting a clothing collection event at the Laboratory for Social and Aesthetic Development. Design firm: Fons Hickmann m23; designers: Fons Hickmann, Gesine Grotrian-Steinweg. This page, top: Posters for a series of sound installations held in 2005 by Kunst in Parochial that each visitor would experience differently. Design firm: cyan. This page, above: Poster for the 10th anniversary of the dance company cie. toula limnaios. Design firm: cyan. This page, right: Promotional cam-paign for a series of exhibitions at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlins major contemporary art museum. Design firm: Double Standards; designer: Chris Rehberger.

th e best th i ng about bei ng i n ber li n is bei ng left alone.

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in Berlin for the past 20 years, music and packaging designer Angela Lorenz says she would be very surprised if someone could tell from looking at her work where it came from. Ten or 15 years ago, I might have considered myself a Berlin designer, says Lorenz. But the Berlin I would have meant is now history.

In early 2006, a coalition of organizations, including Vitra Design Museum Berlin, launched Create Berlin, an attempt to distill the hype that surrounds the citys chaotic creative activity and rebrand it in a way that might attract clients to the notoriously impoverished capital. So far, the organizers have selected a logo design by Martin Christel, and, during the 2006 Design Mai (Berlins annual design festival), they held a press conference and organized lectures.

Other designers, however, are unenthusiastic about this insti-tutionalized attempt to invent a catchall image for the citys diverse and ad hoc output. Their alternate approach is simple: Use the un-usual resources that life in Berlin provides designerstime, space, and an abundance of cultural clients prepared to take risksto

produce work that is thoughtful, urbane and, most important, globally facing. None of the people I know want to be tied up in such an identity as Create Berlin; its just not relevant, says Joerg Koch, founder and publisher of 032c, a biennial arts magazine that has accumulated a substantial readership and critical following, especially outside of Germany. There is no one way to dress, to live, or to be in Berlin, agrees Gesine Grotrian-Steinweg, a partner in the studio Fons Hickmann m23. We start from scratch with every new project and try to bring in a new style.

For designers like Koch, Berlins marginal relationship to the design world and its lack of viable clients help minimize the potential for distraction. As long as you have a project in mind, the best thing about being in Berlin is being left alone. Here, Koch can focus on the work of making his magazine, taking cheap flights to appointments in Paris or London when necessary. Theres no hobnobbing going on here, because theres no industry, he says. Kochs sentiments are echoed by Raeder, for whom Berlin functions like an island that

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allows him to be disconnected. Because its not as well defined in terms of design as cities like London, Amsterdam, or Paris, Berlin offers designers the space to develop new ideas relatively free from the scrutiny of the media or from fellow designers. For Koch, the fact that theres no Peter Saville to watch, no true establishment that you have to pay attention to is liberating.

While few of the designers interviewed for this article characterize themselves as Berlin designers and fewer believe that the place shapes their work in any significant way, its clear that the city does provide them with specific infrastructural conditions that enable them to make the work they do. Kai von Rabenau, who publishes and designs mono.kultur, a small magazine that consists of a single extended interview in each issue, says he believes Berlin is the only place his endeavor could exist. In any other city, it would be im-possible to get a magazine off the ground without any financial backing. But here, because you can get by with relatively little, would-be publishers like Von Rabenau have enough time to devote to

their extracurricular passion. And everyone has a self-initiated project of some description.

A profusion of cheap spaces enables designers to set up their own stores, clothing labels, galleries, and publicationswhatever theyve dreamed of creating. These enterprises are barely profitable, but they certainly act as test beds for experimentation, and make memorable three-dimensional calling cards for when those rare clients do emerge. Chris Rehberger, who has in the past run a store, a gallery, and a record label, in addition to his five-person design studio, is currently preoccupied with lamps, which he makes in glass and Plexiglas and sells in Berlins MoMA store. We never stop thinking of new lamp designs, he says. It has become something of an addiction.

For designers like cyan and Manuel Raeder, the peculiar circum-stances of Berlin have led them not to become their own clients per se, but to develop intense relationships with their clients in which they are equal and collaborative partners. After several years designing

Opposite page: Cover and spreads of mono.kultur, a bimonthly publication which devotes each issue to an extended interview with one person. Designer: Kai von Rabenau. This page: Two covers of the biennial arts and culture magazine 032c. Left: A cover dating from its conception in 2000 features a square of Pantone 032c printed on newsprint. Right: A cover on glossy pa-per stock from the summer of 2005 when the publications creators began to evolve the cover design into something more newsstand-friendly. Creative director: Joerg Koch.

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Top: CD packaging for the music labels Data Error (left) and Orthlorng musork (center and right), in which the generative potential of digital design is explored by remixing visual elements from oth-er covers. Designer: Angela Lorenz. Center left: A looseleaf 2006 wall calendar is a kit of parts that contains a different approach to organizing time for each month of the year. Design firm: Rocket Scientists Breakfast; designer: Manuel Raeder. Center right: Cover of a newspaper published in conjunction with Alliance Graphique Internatio-nales 2005 meeting in Berlin for which all 120 AGI members were asked to send a black-and-white poster of their impression of Berlin. Design firm: Fons Hickmann m23; designer: Fons Hickmann. Bottom: Additional examples of Manuel Raeders inverted signage system for Bless. Design firm: Rocket Scientists Breakfast; designer: Manuel Raeder; photographer: Stefan Korte; event orga-nizer: Yasmine Gauster.


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promotional materials and videos for the dance company cie. toula limnaios, for example, Detlef Fiedler and Daniela Haufe, founders of cyan, were invited to become partners in the company, and they now contribute to meetings about choreography as well as those about the design of the next poster. Raeder, too, is able to work so closely with clients like Bless that now he knows what they are about, and how they work, think, and see themselves. Its easy to come up with concepts that a company will love when you know them so intimately. It has always been an aim of Bless to have its seasonal look books reach an audience beyond the press offices of the fashion world, so Raeder devised a method whereby the books are inserted in a range of publications and thus circulated like stowaways. For each new context, he redesigns the look book to fit, hoping it will find a new life of [its] own with the readers of, say, Pacemaker in Paris or Textfield in L.A.

Cyans connection to the city is based on a complex web of client-collaborators and vendors that the partners have woven around their practice since its founding in 1992. Haufe and Fiedler have made a commitment to work only with cultural clients, so they have spent the past 17 years fine-tuning a network of what they call connections and collaborators that enables them to work around the low budgets and crunched production timetables typical of nonprofits such as dance companies and experimental music festivals. Now they know every silk-screen printer in the city and which ones will give them an extra color for free. They cannot imagine being able to build up such an arrangement in another country at this pointand in this regard, they are very much of Berlin.

For Koch, it is important that readers can tell where 032c is produc-ed. There are so many magazines floating around that you cannot tell whether they were produced in London, Paris, or Stockholm, he says. I want 032c to be coming from somewhere, and not just using an international language of glossy magazines. And the magazine certainly reflects its Berlin roots through a section like Berlin Review, a regular overview of the projects, exhibitions, and people the magazine feels represents the past six months in Berlin. A recent issue also included a review of a Douglas Gordon exhibition, the diary of Maurizio Cattelans experience of curating the fourth Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art, and a reflection on the Berlin-based Estonian composer Arvo Prt on his 70th birthday.

And visually? Is it possible to tell just by looking at it that the magazine comes from Berlin? Berlin design has clearly evolved and distanced itself from the cut-up aesthetic that defined the early post-unification years. The works shown on these pages are connected not by their appearance, but by a shared conceptual approach and

sensibility that links them more to other work across national borders than to each other. But there are some identifiable features of the new work emanating from the city. Looking at 032c, for exampleespecially the early issues that were printed on newsprint in two colors, black and red (Pantone 032c)its clear that cheap production methods and the Berlin-bred boldness to invent or resist have informed the publications visual language. That the first three issues had the same coverthe Pantone red square on newspaperwas, according to Koch, commercial suicide, of course. But even as the magazine began to attract advertisers, evolve into a thicker book printed on better stocks, and increase its distribution beyond small art galleries to newsstands, Koch continued to want to deconstruct what a cover means.

The summer 2005 issue sported a Tom Cruise coveras mainstream as you can get, says Koch. It was 032cs distinctive take on celebrity culture, however, because of the covers design. They gave the Cruise image, shot by Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin, lots of white space, and juxtaposed it with a smaller image of a monolith sculpture by the Berlin sound artist Carsten Nicolai. The scrapbook-style juxtaposition of these elements creates a dissonant energy, but one that is contained in a frame. In this case, the defiant anti-cover gesture is balanced by a Swiss-German counterweight toward good graphic design.

Similarly, cyans zinging Day-Glo silk-screen posters, too big for most of the citys hoardings and almost too bright for the gray climate, are moderated by what they call their micro-typography. And even Rehberger, with his bubble-gum-hued typography for the Perlon record label, exploding like 1960s supergraphics off the edges of the canvas, finds balance in his work through restraint. When Rehberger says of his firm, Double Standards, we are actually conservative designers, the label begins to ring true for others, too.

Anyone who has spent time in Berlin may well balk at the word conservative applied to the daring and knowingly oppositional creative work coming out of the city. And, at first glance, it does seem somewhat incongruous. But Berlin design is changingyou could say it is growing up. The designers featured here are engaged in a balancing act that needs continuous and delicate adjustment: Their work is intimately connected to other examples of conceptually rooted design at the global level and, at the same time, they have stakeholding roles in concerns and businesses that are nothing if not local. It may not be conservatism exactly, but its evident that the self-government of their rigorous and concept-led design is helping to curb and redirect the excesses allowed in one of Europes most famous creative playgrounds.

a profusion of ch eap spaces enables designers to set up th ei r own stor es, galler i es, publicationswhatever it is th eyve dr eam ed of cr eati ng.


Print's Guide to PostersMoving PicturesDont Worry About the GovernmentNeue Berlin

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