Well, we might actually have a job available soon. It only happens once in a hundred years and we will be very, very picky. Please read the detailed description here before applying.
(The position is no longer available)

If you happen to be in Tokyo at the moment you can see our work as part of a group exhibition on UK Design at the Parco Factory in Shibuya. UK?OK! is on until the 30th of August. Other participants include: Åbäke, Bibliothèque, Eat Sleep Work/Play, Julia, Neville Brody, Non-Format, Studio 8, Tomato and many more. A book and catalogue is being published in connection with the exhibition and if your Japanese is up to scratch you can follow it on Twitter and there is a little movie on YouTube.

We just did a big update of the web section on our website. We still see ourselves more as print and corporate identity designers but many of our websites have been part of bigger jobs that included print or identity design.

We have been asked by Simone Vollenweider & Anna Sartorius – two students at the HGB Leipzig – to take part in their Type Cruiser Font Project.
The typeface “Cruiser” will be in an Ebay auction from July 19th till August 2nd. With each new tenderer a new character will be introduced into the existing font. Each new character is drawn by another designer. We designed the pound sign (£) since this is usually the character that causes us the most worries and threw in Dr. Ink as an extra. Please go and bet for the font and keep an eye open for our character!

Our ex-intern Steffie finished her diploma at the FH Düsseldorf and Holger went over to Germany to see the degree show. Its most definitely the heaviest design produced as it needed a forklift truck to lift her logo for the museum island Hombroich. Congratulations Steffie!

Holger was invited (thanks, Elisa!) to give a talk on collaborations in graphic and interior design at the University of Arts in Venice (IUAV) as part of their yearly WAVe workshop series. A beautiful Art school, right on the water and you can see the big cruise ships docking at the end of the campus.

We must be bored; or its too hot do design anything sensible. Today we created Dr. Ink, the new studio mascot. He might appear on our coffee mugs soon.

Belmacz is finally about to open their first high street shop in London and we have started designing it. So far it is just a smoking volcano but it will explode soon! Our design is focusing on the contrast between raw minerals, how they are created by often violent natural events and the final polished piece of jewelry that seems to be quite removed from this process.

Our work has been in quite a few magazines and books recently and there are still more to come out. The nicest to mention is probably the Japanese Idea magazine which we have been reading for years and admire for its continuously interesting content and most beautiful printing. We are also in good company among many friends and other small studios whose work we like.

It took a little while but today we finally installed a simplified 3d version of the Tess logo in their reception area. The sign is made from different layers of acrylics separated by spacers.

A farewell and goodbye to Malcom McLaren. It may not be directly work related but without him and the first adventures in cut and paste graphics our studio may never have existed.

We just designed and programmed a new website for the photographer Holger Pooten – a friend and fellow country-man of our Holger. It’s a small and neat slideshow site. Check out his cool hyper-real photographs!

We have already started working on the t-shirts and merchandising for our exhibition in Japan. The theme is ‘sound’. It just so happens that the Japanese word for sound (‘oto’) has got two ears. We seem to have developed a serious preference for circular lines.

The Tom Dixon magazine came back from the printers. This year it is not a newspaper but a magazine printed on thin paper like a supplement. To go with the new all shiny photography we designed a ‘glam’ version of Futura Maxi.

We finally managed to take some photos of the D100 interior. Currently working on the website.
→ D100 Dentistry

Playlab is running a game of facial bingo as part of the Friday Late event at the V&A. Paul is seen here after he was very easily convinced to make his own sign! We designed a small, quick and dirty Ichi Face website for the event.

We stocked up on caffeine and Pot noodles, worked many nightshifts in a row and finished the yearly Tom Dixon catalogue and magazine again. The result is a big stack of crushed copper shades that’s just been printed.

We just discovered that our client and owner of Crêpe Affaire Daniel Spinath has been on Channel 4 showing off his pancake cooking and flipping skills. You don’t often see that much crêpe on TV. See for yourself!

We are testing different pattern for the lamp we are developing with Tom Dixon. The first samples from the metal etching company are back.

We were invited to take part in an exhibition on British Design in Tokyo during August this year. Today the organizers Akira and Takeshi came to visit us together with two photographers to discuss the exhibition, for a short interview and to take some shots in the studio.

We developed 6 little animations for Playlab which are finally online. Just use the reload button to see them all.

Our ex-intern Lea graduated and sent us some pictures today. Great final project – bold, confident and intelligent.

Today we installed a pair of rather large watchful eyes at Circus. So even if all the guests are too drunk someone will still be watching the performers.

We are almost finished with implementing the new identity we designed for the dentist practice D100. The window already features our ‘tooth circles’ inspired by Japanese Zen gardens and protective layers of enamel around those precious teeth.

We just made some updates on Shideh Shaygan’s homepage. She has done some amazing new projects and even though we did the website a couple of years ago still like it very much.

The studio is now closed for the Christmas break. We have all flown out to tropical beaches drinking cocktails under palm trees. (Wishful thinking: actually most of us got stuck in miserable London as flights were cancelled due to the weather). Back on the 4th. Happy Christmas everyone.

We spent our first evening at the now up and running Circus club and witnessed performers doing acrobatics just above the large dining tables.

Frank Philippin, professor for graphic design in Darmstadt came to visit the studio with about twenty students from his class. We only showed them one single project but in every annoying little detail, explaining all technical aspects of the implementation.

Today we started printing everything for Circus, hopefully just in time for the opening next week. A few experiments again: printing on mirror board, laminating ordinary rough grey board and foil blocking crazy disco foils. All looking good so far.

Tea will soon be available in shops and supermarkets. Today we got the first boxes back from the printer. We just hope we got the barcodes right.

Tom Dixon asked us to design acid etched pattern and all packaging for one of his new products. We are just getting used to it.

I think we may have blown our whole design budged on making dummies… in layered Perspex, engraved mirrors, etched steel, on RGB led lights, coloured vinyl, etc, etc.

The Circus building site is a maze of cables, scaffolding, wood panels and insulation material. Hard to believe that there will be dancers performing here in about three weeks time.

We have added three recent projects to the website.
→ TESS Management identity
→ TESS Newspaper
→ What On Earth packaging

We just finished working on a book art piece for Znips, the hair salon we designed recently. Our multi-talented intern Rebecca bought lots of old books from a charity shop, chopped them into small strips and arranged them like strands of hair.

Our website has been in existence for quite a while now. However, we have always been too busy to fill it with content. Now we made a start. It still only shows a very small selection of our work (more can be seen in the downloadable pdf in the work section) but we will do our best to put up more projects every week.

We are currently working on the identity for a new club in Covent Garden called Circus which will open in December. To see how our logo would work in 3d we built a dummy from polyboard and put it in front of a light box. Eventually the lights should be in between the different layers.

We just refurbished our studio. Finally we have larger tables and new shelfing units between the workspaces. It was quite a task to untangle the messy cabling of years that nobody dared to touch before. During the rebuild we worked on a small island in the middle of the studio while the carpenter worked around us. It was quite dusty.

We just printed the newspaper for TESS, the model agency for which we designed a new identity. The logo on the belly bands around the newspaper is printed in five different spot colours. Our printer kept a sheet of each layer.

Holger scored the top score in the font game and insisted on having this in our news section.

We designed a new packaging concept for the organic food producer “What on Earth”. The new packaging shows an arrangement of linocut illustrations. For two days our studio turned into a cutting and printing workshop to produce a range of images that can be used on boxes, tins and wrappers.

Johannes and Andy went for a weekend to Dublin and visited the National Print Museum. The museum has a great collection of old letter press tools, letters and setting machines. You are free to wander around and explore by yourself.

Every year the whole studio flies over to Zurich for a weekend to meet old friends, interns and see the degree show at the Z hdk. It has become a tradition to go and eat the Jumbo Jumbo Cordon-Bleu (a massive piece of meat stuffed with cheese and ham) in the Rheinfelder Bierhalle. This year Alex finished first, closely followed by Andy and Holger. Craig struggled the most and claimed experiencing dizziness apparently caused by meat overdose.

The Tom Dixon newspaper on display at the Milan Furniture Fair.

On his trip to Japan Holger organized an official Buddhist blessing for the studio at a Shinto shrine near Kyoto. Now we will be save from bad spirits of the credit crunch for the near future (hopefully). To put the new blessing into place we had to burn the old one and drink upon it.

Johannes and Holger spent three days (and nights) at the printers to see the catalogue on press and to make sure that the colours come out correctly.

Andy went to see the Tom Dixon newspaper being printed. 90,000 copies in three hours — an impressive speed.
This press reminded us more of the machines in The Matrix than the trusted Heidelberg Speedmaster we are used to.

The final phase of the Tom Dixon catalogue and newspaper chained us to the studio for about a month on a diet of Pot Noodles, Red Bull and Caffeine. Johannes even slept here twice because he was too tired to walk home in the early morning.