We have been really busy and not overly present on this blog in recent months, so here we go – taking a quick breath – and giving you 3 short posts in one.

1. COMEMAI – first own product, first own online shop
We have put our first own shop online – with our own products: COMEMAI – the Sleeve that suits your iPad. It is actually a great experience to be designer AND client at the same time. Also: we have never been this close to what usually are our clients’ clients, which is lots of fun and lets us observe reactions and draw marketing conclusions. All this experience we take into the online shop projects we are currently working on – sitting both on the clients and on the designers side.

We love the iPad and we are very happy about our sleeves. Check out the shop online:
www.comemai.net

If you like what you see you can keep in touch here:
facebook.com/mycomemai

2. Selected Concepts – Branding
We are currently finishing the online shop for Selected GALLERY aswell. But let’s start at the beginning. I was approached by Ralf from Selected GALLERY saying that he needed a logo for his new Selected INTERIORS project. We developed an umbrella brand Selected CONCEPTS with the sub-brands Gallery and Interiors, a clear branding with particular business cards (produced by Bölling, perfectly as always), product flyer, online communication, etc.

So it turned out a beautiful project with Ralf always striving for excellence in anything we started together, simply because that’s the way he works as an interior designer. I very much like and appreciate that. A big Thank You from here…

We are currently finishing the online shop for Selected GALLERY but both sites are already worth a look because they have beautiful objects to offer.
www.selected-gallery.de
www.selected-interiors.de

3. Schöne Räume – Branding

Schöne Räume is Ralf’s atelier for interiors and design. Seeing what lift design gave to his Selected project made him want new branding for Schöne Räume aswell. Here’s what we developed together (printed by Bölling):

When we designed the corporate communication for the gap between one of our primary goals – besides creating a company presence with a high impact – was to allow the client to design and scale his communication by himself. What we created was an umbrella brand “the gap between” with sub-brands following a clear but unique design style. We made it easy to use keeping a high brand recognition.

Now if the gap between decides that they’ll introduce a new blog or a new sub-brand they don’t have to ask their branding agency for an offer. Strategic decisions can be checked and implemented in design in a very simple manner. To create a sub-brands’ logo they just type in the name and pick a colour of a predefined set of colours. Operation Butterfly only optimises letter spacing and it’s done. A self-made logo that doesn’t look self-made at all.

It also works with PDF-sheets and video templates. Knowing how design output without guidance can look like and what damage it can cause I am happy how good they design now :-). And the gap between is happy because visions can become reality so easily. Without a web-to-print solution with often huge set-up costs. For us nothing is better than a happy client. And it makes the collaboration a great pleasure on both sides.

Our design for the gap between has been awarded with the iF communication design award 2010 in the category corporate communication. “A total of 1,687 entries were submitted to this year’s iF communication design award. The jury presented the coveted iF label 499 times to 480 entries. The top 30 entries, the iF gold awards, will be announced at the awards ceremony at BMW Welt in Munich on September 3. ‘Outstanding works of excellent craftsmanship, in particular in the print sector (…)’ – that was the opinion of this year’s jury for the iF communication design award. Many works displayed a focus on reduction and clarity of message but there were also experimental pieces that impressed the jury. (from www.ifdesign.de)

So it is great to see that a design that is set up to give the client maximum freedom at the same time meets highest international design standards.

You can find images of the corporate design here.
A big THANK YOU to the gap between and our printers from Bad Soden – Bölling.

In one of the next post I will give some insight on how we create similar design independence for Dulce Chocolate & Ice Cream.

Also on this channel very soon some insights on COMEMAI – the Sleeve that suits your iPad – a current “inhouse” project we just launched and are very excited about.

Stay curious !

the gap between does strategic music consulting. The company name says it all: the gap between bridges the emotional gap between product and consumer by means of music. It can be this simple even in a complex and highly specialized field.

Having a common affinity with marketing and a shared standpoint about the value of good design for a company the collaboration between the gap between and Operation Butterfly proved a lot of fun with an effective branding output. The design is faithful to the concept in every detail and in the realisation no compromises were made. Working with Jan Thomas from the gap between was at every moment of the project a pleasure and inspiring. Visit their website to learn more about what music can do.

To create a bing bang at company launch we developped a mailing with a poster as its hero. Music, media and marketing in the mix – interesting and relevant numbers from 2009. Find out more about the poster here.

Productionwise we had once again excellent support of Bölling in Bad Soden (boelling.com/de) who didn’t get tired thriving for the perfect result. Our requests were not on the easy side so it was nice to see them not loosing their good mood. Every single business card was checked on quality. I think they were happy when everything was done…

In my blog post CHefsache09 / Learning from the best – Swiss style I have described my top three lessons learnt at WWF, Freitag Taschen, Turbinenbräu and Projekttriangle. The pictures above show the documentary I have designed after the trip.

Here are the companies we have visited in three days:

Bankhaus Wegelin

Blogwerk AG

Forma Futura Invest AG

Freitag Taschen

Humiecki & Graef

Liberovision

Manres

Projekttriangle

SKIVE Aviation AG

Southpole – Carbon Asset Management Ltd.

Swiss Smile

The Dolder Grand

Turbinenbräu

WWF

Zeix – Agentur für Usability und User Education

Zumtobel

It’s always hard to design for oneself. The first reactions though when handing over my new business card have already convinced me that all the effort and time that went into the creation of logo and corporate design was worth it. The logo (and the card) is the essence of what I am saying here. Hope you find too. You are more than welcome to comment.

The business cards are hot foil stamped on heavy black card board. Productionwise I had the excellent support of Bölling in Bad Soden (boelling.com/de) who did a perfect job. Thanks again!

The last thing I wanted to do is to add yet another Apple iPad post to the internet to the millions there have been before the 27th January and the millions of posts and comments that there have been since then. Following all the #fail comments on twitter I changed my mind so here’s a few thoughts.

The discussions going on about the iPad – how it is not so genius, how it lacks so many fundamental functions and capabilities – remember me a lot the first discussions about the iPhone. Apple in the mobile phone market? Hey, what’s needed here is not a toy, but a phone! And all the things missing, no GPS, no MMS, no Copy-Paste, etc. Now, with the 3rd generation iPhone all these “lackings” are sorted out and we can be curious what further innvoations there will be for the product. Currently Apple makes more profit in the mobile market than mobile phone giant Nokia (iPhone helps Apple pull more profit than Nokia). And now, after only 3 years and 75 Mio iPhones sold, even the biggest PC fans (or Apple opponents) own an iPhone – or can’t wait for their contract to expire to finally get one.

My daughter started to navigate through the photos and videos on my iPhone when she was 2 years old. I can clearly see people not so familiar with the digital world having a very easy approach in daily use with the iPad. I think it is a fantastic device and in my opinion the lacking of features has purely strategic reasons: to keep the price down in order to open up the door to a broad market. And will we miss an USB-Port or Drag and Drop File Management when we pick up the device from the kitchen table to flip through some newspapers or in order to write a quick e-mail? I would rather doubt that. And will my mother wish for multi-tasking or a camera while watching videos from her grandchildren? I highly doubt that. But I am looking forward to that camera which surely will be built in in the second generation.

I think – as always with design – the experience will make it and I am convinced it will be a really good one. I can picture the iPad in many daily situations. Can’t wait to do a presentation with it.

As for the publishing industry, paid content has been the big issue in the recent months. The content and the contracts made will show – but if the iPad saves the publishing industry (and makes Apple earn fortunes in the meantime) – I am happy for both of them.

During my first summer semester breaks as a student in communication design 1998 I went to London  to study English and booked a course of five weeks.

I ran out of money after a week and needed a solution if I wanted to stay. In London, I thought, earning money is easy, I just walk in one of those pubs. But nobody wanted me since I had no waiter experience. So the next day I took the yellow pages, looked up some design agencies in Center London and passed by three to have a look. Since I didn’t have any kind of reference with me, I was surprised two of them were ready to take me immediately on an afternoon basis. And I started to work at the Kord Group London (today fresh01.com). The openness in that vibrant city is certainly what London stood for in that period.

It ended that they wanted me to stay and I only went back to Germany to get my winter clothes and to tell university that I take a semester off.

It happened to become a really exciting period, particularly designwise. Beside the work I enjoyed I was discovering the London music and design world. In one of those little libraries I have discovered an issue of Emigre. Then I started to collect all the issues I could grab. Emigre covered a for graphic design very exciting and transformative period after the introduction of the first Apple Computer and the digital shift it provoked. The magazine both documented the design experimentations and was at the same time contributor and pioneer to the movement. Text was not only to be read – it was to be seen at the same time. Emigre (with its digital type foundry) was among the first typographers of the digital realm.

This book – put it simply – is a reprint of selected work. For me it has a personal historic relevance. But this book is – above all – a part of graphic design history which nobody interested in graphic design should miss.

When DesignInsight acquired their new showroom it was a completely run down building where last signs of beauty have been observed maybe in the early sixties. The building was completely empty. Well, not completely: on the second floor, inmidst bricks, dust and torn down wallpapers, there was an aquarium. And in that aquarium a gold fish. Alive and well.

Since our positioning idea was “contemporary antiques”, meaning that DesignInsight stands for modern contemporary interiors with ageless style and practically ever-lasting quality, the idea soon came up to make the fish the logo. And we developed the corporate design around it.

Our gold fish is now also taken care of. One of the partners took it home. Brought a bigger aquarium, plants and some fish friends for a happy future.

For some full screen interiors moods check out www.designinsight.de

Chefsache is a entrepreneurial study trip, a non-commercial come-together of very different people, who want to learn and understand what moves successful entrepreneurs. This years Chefsache took us to Zürich – 3 1/2 days divided more or less in 120 minute slots, including sleep. 16 businesses, 3 restaurants, 5 bars and a boat trip.

This time we were a group of twenty. Certainly everybody gets out of the trip something else. My top three lessons learnt:

1. We can save the world
This is the fact that surprised me the most. To “save the world” we should be able to change ourselves first, our attitudes and addiction to comfort. Visiting the WWF headquarters (www.wwf.ch) and talking to the programme director Thomas Vellacott I was expecting some tough stories with inhuman efforts looking for (never arriving) solutions. A great ethic is just not enough. If you want change, you need to fundamentally change how people think.

Thomas Vellacott showed us that this is exactly what WWF is doing. Slowly  but steadily changing peoples minds. Through creating for example win-win situations with cooperation partners on the retail side the WWF manages to shift whole markets and promote ecological products, changing consumer behavior. Their work locally and globally, with adult consumers or with children is highly professional and clearly goal-oriented. How efficiently this professionality and pragmatic thinking is invested in everybody’s good remains largely unnoticed by the public. Paradoxically that’s probably what makes it work so well. If a few people stop thinking inside the box and invest their intelligence in something good, all of us are able to save the world. It sounds pathetic but I mean it.

2. Stop and be happy
Or at least: refrain from doing things you don’t necessarily need. Like scaling your business. Two cases: Freitag Taschen (www.freitag.ch) and Turbinenbräu (www.turbinenbraeu.ch).

Freitag Taschen produces messenger bags out of old truck tarpaulin since 1993. Since the beginning Freitag Taschen had been growing slowly but steadily. By now the founding Freitag brothers could have conquered the States easily or adapt their ecological tarpaulin competence to other lifestlyle products. They could have but they didn’t. And they are fully aware of it. They just let it be. And seem authentically happy with it.

The same with Turbinenbräu and its founder Adrien Weber. Why sell your beer abroad or even outside Zürich if you a) live well on the sales and b) want to work with people you like and who you can drink a coffee with anytime, visiting them on your “velo”. And chat with them about soccer. Or life in general. And then do the business later via an SMS, late after midnight on the way home after a fulfilled day.

Writing a book about the perfect work / life balance would be a waste of time too, for both of them.

3. Be excellent in what you do
People won’t bother you with other things. Prof. Jürgen Späth from the design studio Projekt Triangle (www.projekttriangle.com) is doing really great design, with strong concepts and very strong aesthetics. To my surprise – when asked – he didn’t have a definition ready of “good” design. He is just doing good design and doesn’t want to generalise. Running a studio and calculating with budgets doesn’t seem a matter either. People at Projekttriangle work until design and production set-up is at 100%. Even if they are 400% over budget. Prof. Späth didn’t leave any doubt it’s all worth it.

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The images above: Invitation / Corporate I designed for the trip. Photos from the trip – the one from the group is by Matthias Pindter, participant.
More about CHefsache09 is soon available on chefsache09.de.

The branding of Dulce Chocolate & Ice Cream

Good things happen when two people love eachother. Lots of good things when they not only love eachother but also love the same things. Or doing the same things. In our case Matthias and Babs Schneider, the founders of Dulce, love to create exquisite chocolate and ice cream. So they opened a little café in Frankfurts rather romantic part Sachsenhausen (if you can use Frankfurt and romantic in the same sentence) and lived happily. They mainly served the people themselves and people knew and liked them. Famous in Sachsenhausen. And since people liked what they ate Matthias and Babs started to open stores, first in Frankfurt, then in other cities, 14 in 2 1/2 years.

At some point people didn’t know them any more. And even though the high quality of the products never worsened chocolate and ice cream started to feel a bit more off the shelf rather than some exquisite creations. This is when branding strategy comes in. Whereas the logo we created initially still worked, we had to fill it with life. To tell the story of the brand dulce even where the couple can’t tell it themselves. To restore the image of the first shop in Frankfurt Sachsenhausen. The concept “My sweet Love” tells this story of a couple who set out to spread their passion for chocolate and ice cream. It is told in the manner of a fairy tale. A fairy tale come true.

Complete branding package: from the communication concept to the design of the napkins.

At the moment we are analysing what social media can do for Dulce.