This was the big one. Thank you everyone for coming!!!

Don’t believe the hype!

Always great to see our rather simple designs in the very very busy catalogue of our Japanese client Askul. We recently re-designed the bottled green tea range of the most famous Japanese tea brand Ito En for their product range.

It was to expect that at some point someone would ask us to make a graphic Brexit statement. This guys ME & EU did.

Today my first year students put up a little show of the hundreds of posters they designed. Followed by the bigger Werkshow (Degree Show) that will start Saturday.

Today I visited the German concrete poet Franz Mon, one of my all-time heroes at his home in Frankfurt. Now 90 years old, he has been an inspiration to me since my early student days and it was a great privilege to meet the great man in person. To respect his privacy I would not show any of the selfies I took with him here, neither pictures of his home studio.

We had our studio Christmas party a bit earlier this year. As usually in The Dove. Everyone who worked for the studio in the last couple of years came.

Fresh on (and soon off) the press are our new designs for We Are Tea which are about to hit the supermarket shelves soon.

A great triumph for media and design. We have proven that our kind can even turn a pig into a president. There is no content anymore, just surfaces.

Us, posing in front of Olive+Squash.

After months in the making Olive+Squash has finally opened its doors.

We all went to a talk by design intellectual heavyweights Metahaven at Auto Italia Southeast. All recent developments in politics prove them right.

Ex-colleague Romilly turned the the studio (well, half of it) into a proper disco to celebrate his lovely wives Birthday. We are still finding the metallic glitter confetti on the floor, Rom.

The best and most rewarding thing about this job is actually seeing things being produced. Especially by some magic CNC robot which cuts into laminated plywood with amazing precision. Today we produced the new menu boards for Olive+Squash, our latest restaurant project which will open soon.

Some of the old (and new) Mind Design crew gathered at Craigs Birthday party in his little Hobbit studio, playing such exciting games as Beer Ping Pong. Happy Birthday Grandmaster Craig!

You may have noticed that (since the last server update of our lovely provider) our website has been infiltrated by question marks. Quite a few of those. Annoying but also interesting in a kind of experimental reading way. Anyway, the new , long overdue, website is on its way so we may not bother fixing it all manually.

We are taking part in a little exhibition in Sheffiled that our Friend Joanna Rucklidge organized. Its called Like-Letters and we are featured with the glorious letter H.

Our studio has been featured on Katalog. We are in good company among many other nice studios whose work we like. However, since all the studios look kind of similar, all designers look cool and all work is obviously cool as well, we decided, neither to show our studio, nor our faces or our work. Commercially a complete missed opportunity.

The legendary graffiti on our building (no idea how they managed to get it on there) is being removed. I guess they took the cost for that operation out of our service charge.

We have four deskspaces in our large and de-cluttered studio available. E-mail us for details.

Our big Studio Jumble Sale (on what felt like the hottest weekend of the year) was quite a success. We cleared out most of the stuff and made a bit of money as well. Might do it again next saturday.

Our big Studio Jumble Sale is coming up. This Saturday and Sunday!!!. Come along and grab a super bargain. We are clearing out a lot of stuff.

First the country was run by bankers, now by idiots. Time to leave.

Our work has been copied quite a bit. Sometimes it annoys us but most of the time we find it quite amusing. This is a great example our client has sent us. Note the rather adventurous attempt on Helvetica Bold. Its almost better than out clean version in a kind of deconstructive postmodern way. Although that might not have been the intention.

It was very enjoyable to talk at Protein Gallery yesterday about the work of Klaus Peter Dienst. Glad to see that so many people came and it was fascinating to listen to the other speakers. Thank you for coming.

Holger will be talking about brutal letterforms next wednesday at the Protein Gallery as part of the popular Letterform Live series organized by Grafik. More info here. Come along.

Not sure if we mentioned it before. Some of our designs are available from the German online design gallery and shop Vollends. Check it out. Our stuff is the cheapest on the site.

Some of our Typeface designs will be shown in an exhibition at the Grafik Biennial in Brno as part of the Off-Programme. More info here.

Since we always had more space than we actually needed we decided to split the studio right in the middle. One part is used for work and the other as a flexible, multi-pupose space. Feels much more focussed and cosy now.

In the last year we worked on quite a few websites. Some part of bigger identity projects. We have been a bit lazy updating our own website but today we put a few new projects up in the web section. Although not in great detail yet. More to come.
→ Web Section

Today Romilly, ex-Mind Design colleague, good friend and probably one of the fastest designers in London got married to the lovely Abbie. Congratulations Rom and Abbie!!!

Went to see one of my all time heros at the Logan Hall. Bought the book, got it signed by the great man. Bloody expensive but impossible to resist. And absolutely worth it. Great talk, great book. Some of my students went to NY recently and visited him in his home/studio. Thanks for that, Mr. Wyman. Why don’t designers run for president in the USA? Instead of those idiots. If someone can make the letter M look like a cute Moose he can run the country.

Today a group of students from Kingston came to see us in the studio to talk about typefaceces they designed under the guidance of their tutor, the brilliant Marcus Leis Allion.

We designed the overall identity for Deborah Pagani, a New York based jewellery designer. More to come soon.

Our Work for Tom Dixon and Lacoste (Eco/Techno polo) is currently being shown at the RePack exhibition in Munich, Germany. The Exhibition at the Maximilian Forum focuses on sustainable and innovative packaging. It is still on until the first of March.

The Werkschau (degree show) at the HSD Düsseldorf, where Holger is teaching took place again. The poster and orientation system were designed by Holgers students.

Holgers first year students produced over 1000 posters in one term. A selection of them was shown at the Filmwerstatt in Düsseldorf.

The Studio Christmas Dinner in the Dove (where else?). We closed early this year and will be open on the 4th of January again.We do no annoy our clients with digital Chrismas cards but let me take this opportunity to thank our clients for their trust and wish everyone a Happy Christmas and a great New Year!

We designed quite a bit of tea packagings over the years. Somehow clients seem to think when you have done one well you must be good at it. This time it was bubble Tea. All made from circles. Easy but nice

Went to Berlin. Met Mr. Spiekermann in his amazingly well organized print workshop. Respect.

The Visit of French Students from Lyon becomes a regular event in the Mind Design Calendar. We tried to scare them away with (according to our lovely French intern Auré) disgusting British finger food but they keep coming.

Holger's German students came to London again for a one week excursion. There is always a theme to those trips. This time we only met designers over 65. Among them Alan Kitching and corporate design legends such as Michael Wolff and Mike Dempsey. Good to speak to the people who really have seen and done it all.

Today we launched our new identity and website for the London fine jewellery brand Noor Fares. Coinciding with Paris Fashion week. The new website we designed is responsive, dynamic and has more social media integration than anyone could ask for. All singing, dancing with changing navigation bar colours. Our developer Tudinh has done a great job. Samples for Noors new packaging are on the way too.

We keep a little diary or our logos that have been destroyed by clever marketing people or those who can put a Pinterest page together and think they know all about design. Today we learned that our Circus logo (featured in many design publications) has been replaced by something…hmm, let's call it 'less complex'. I am not even against change — we designers live on re-designing things — but why does it always have to be something so dull and predictable? Would be nice to actually see someone kicking out our old design and doing it better. And not another website with parallax scrolling, please. Rant ends.

Our Studio has always been far to big for us. We hear of other spaces where 10 designers squeeze into half of our space. So we decided to share the space. Ideally looking for web designers or developers. Please get in touch if you are interested. Brilliant space with lots of daylight in a great location. Plus a huge choice of over-priced hipster sandwiches for lunch just around the corner. The bikes will move, no worries.

The new team (apart from Holger, who took the photo). Truly international. France, Italy, Belgium and Germany (twice).

The Yoga Campus Website is live. There are still a few bugs to fight but apart from its sister website, The Life Centre this is probably one of the most complex websites we ever did. If you fancy becoming a Yogi, are searching for enlightenment or battling midlife crisis, here you can search through hundreds of courses (in many different ways). I just wish they would use the right dashes when putting text into the CMS. Given up explaining the difference between hyphens and n-dashes. Lets hope for some typographic enlightenment.

Yusuke, who works for Holger's friend Miho's company Cocoroe in Tokyo came to work with us for 3 days. Only on his last day we found out that he is probably the fastest designer drawing letters in Illustrator we have ever seen. We hope you had a good time in London, Yusuke!