When you work on a project for several months you can get quite excited when it finally assumes shape. This morning the dummy for ΠMagazine arrived at our office Рcheck out all the lovely paper qualities!

I didn’t see the Gregory Crewdson exhibit in Germany (it’s not so often I visit Baden-Baden…) but when I entered Stockholm’s Kul-turhuset this weekend I was lucky to discover that they had a big Gregory Crewdson show on display. Especially the images in his precisely choreographed and elaborately staged “Beneath the Roses” series were impressive. Additional images from the production process provided an insight into how much planning and orchestration is needed to achieve the final results.

The characters of written Thai are just so beautiful – even prohibition signs look kind of friendly.

This weekend, I visited the book fair in Leipzig. Besides presenting an overwhelming amount of literary novelties, the fair is also dedicated to book art. At the yearly exhibition »Best Book Design From All Over The World« arranged by Stiftung Buchkunst you can admire really beautiful books. Great layout, fantastic material choices (especially the Asian people know how to work with paper), sophisticated bindings and other extra details lifted my spirits. 14 books were rewarded, check out the winners here!

Panther Club is an independant publishing platform from London that produces limited print editions in collaboration with international artists and illustrators. Originally, they started out as a blog covering the field of Graphic Arts and illustration. The blog is a fun source for inspiration where you’ll find a mixture of works by new talents as well as interesting material from past decades.

1. Panther Clubs second print
series »Dionysus, The Ecstasy & Madness«
2+3. Collages by Virginia Echeverria

We helped a Berlin-based group of architects with developing their brand and created a corporate identity. We chose to work with colours, something rather unusual amongst architects. We wanted to match the fresh attitude of the architects in question but most importantly we needed a way to make a clear distinction between the members of S3A, who not always act as a group but also as individual service providers.

Together with more than 30 photographers, stylists, hair & make-up artists and models we were part of a fun project during the last weeks. We took care of the visual concept and layout of »Œ Magazine«, which is a new fashion magazine that focuses on Berlin’s fashion scene. The magazine is non-commercial and is in parts financed by crowdfunding. Check out the project’s campaign video here on WeFund and if you like it, feel free to support a good cause!

Contributing photographers: Amos Fricke, Dirk Merten, Lars Borges, Christoph Schemel, Andreas Lux, Jochen Arndt, Rachel de Joode, Clément Martz

Contributing stylists: Christian Stemmler, Christof Post, Rainer Metz, Åsa Lundström, Brenda Barr, Antje Gohlke, MAVEN, Julian Zigerli

Contributing hair & make-up artists: Alexander Soltermann, Henriette Höft, Manuela Kopp, Miriam Jochims

Now I´m on that track of science and science illustration I have to admit that nature itself just tops the attempts of picturing the same. In the Nikon International Small World Competition you can admire the beauty of nature seen by photographers through the light microscope. Inspiring and somehow quite modern.

www.nikonsmallworld.com
1. Cotton fibers stained with berberine sulphate and color depth shaded (200x) (Dr. Lloyd Donaldson)
2. Olivine inclusions in gabbro (magmatic rock) (5x) (Dr. Bernardo Cesare)
3.  Algae and diatoms (10x) (Dr. Arlene Wechezak)
4. Discus fish scales (20x) (Dr. Havi Sarfaty)

If you are looking for some wise words about live, written in a straightforward language with philosophical depth and a good sense of humour, this book is for you! Ok, that’s not what you usually expect from a book mainly regarded as children’s fiction, but then you really do Tove
Jansson wrong if you just see her as the creator of some chubby trolls with funny names that entertain your kids.
At the beginning of the book, Moominpappa is grumpy because he thinks that his family does not need him anymore. They even extinguish a forest burn without asking for his help! He yearns for some danger to protect his family from, so he decides that the whole family should relocate to a lonesome, barren island far out in the ocean. Here, he thinks, he can earn some respect with his great knowledge of the sea. What starts out as a big adventure becomes a story about a family in a crisis. Displacement, unattainable love, the loss of gender roles, marriage problems and the challenges of growing-up, of friendship and of responsibility – all this is dealt with in this simple little story that Tove Jansson narrates with lightness and lots of charm.

Some fast DIY action for a springtime office feel. We need it so badly with minus 9 degrees outside!!

What looks like recent record covers are actually images from the International Science Visualization Challenge 2010 by Science magazine. Here abstract scientific facts or complex actions inside an organism develop an aesthetic dimension.

1. A Genome-Wide Gene Function Association Network for the mustard plant Arabidopsis thaliana | Insuk Lee
2. Human Immunodeficiency Virus 3D | Ivan Konstantinov
3. Proposed Structure of Yeast Mitotic Spindle | Russell Taylor

Funny electricity, serially numbered doors and beautiful floors: we´ll miss all that when c/o Fotogalerie has to move out of Postfuhramt and the place gets transformed into another shopping mall! Until the 27th of March you have the chance to see their last exhibition there, a Robert Mapplethorpe Retrospective.

This is just so lovely!

Wilde Dieren / Wild Animals from Rop van Mierlo on Vimeo.

Series are appealing to me: You start observing your environment in a new way when you are on to something, you discover patterns and you can collect – objects, photos, texts. So it is not surprising that I enjoyed the exhibition »In love, to:« by AFF Architects at DAZ. It is part of a series with three up-and-coming architect studios telling us about their inspiration, design processes and methodology – their »Formula X«, quite simply. AFF’s formula is influenced by objects and images from their past and present, things they love and like to surround themselves with.

So nice to see that Berlin makes one small step after the other towards being the exciting fashion capital everybody likes to talk about. Yesterday we attended the shop opening of »Happy Shop« on Torstraße and we think that this colorful shop with premium and middle priced clothes with a playful and humourous attitude adds another facet to Berlin’s fashion assortment. The head behind the shop is designer Mischa Alexandra Woeste, known from her fashion label, Smeilinener.  Happy clothes, happy people, happy music, happy food, happy Maven : )

Hurry, hurry, until Saturday, January 15th, you can watch the Valentino documentary on Swedish public service online channel SVT Play (that means if you can tolerate that the parts in Italian language are subtitled in Swedish, only). Besides insights into the crazy world of fashion, the documentary offers entertainment, tension & supense and a lot of emotions exchanged between Valentino and his partner and companion Giancarlo Giammetti.

The exhibition »Welt aus Schrift« (translated as “World as Words”) at Kulturforum on Potsdamer Platz takes you on a journey through the development of typography during the 20th century. Posters, books, magazines, invitations, stationery, restaurant menues, shop signs… there are so many places where typography becomes a part of our every day life. Here more than 600 of such examples are on display which outstandingly represent the style of their time and revolutionary turning points. A lot of interesting details are to be explored and inspiring styles to be found and it is amazing that many designs still feel very modern. For all of you that cannot come to Berlin until the 16th of January, there is a catalogue which includes almost all exhibits as well as some deepening essays.

I spent a day at the New Museum this winter. There is so much on display that you easily feel overwhelmed, so I found it helpful to concentrate on some beastly charming details…
By the way, there was no queue time at all, everything seemed back to normal after David Chipperfield’s much talked-about remodeling of the building.

A lot of things kept us busy in December, for instance the art direction and production of a fashion spread for a new Berlin based magazine. We chose an approach which included a great deal of crafting and painting – so nice to get away from the computer for some time! Here are some behind the scenes pictures, we’ll keep you posted with the final results…

Thank you everyone for spending a cosy sunday afternoon with us!