HO, HO, HO

Hello there, first of all, a BIG THANK YOU to Susanne for inviting me to this project, which we started to toss around ages ago, at a BDA conference I think it was, and now it seems to be a good time, for both of us, to actually do it.

I see us as documentalists and collectors, to ensure that the works, their ideas and strategies behind, won’t disappear and find a home and to try to bring them into context with each other and the times they were produced, and to explore if and how they have nurtured each other. But also find the key points in the timeline, like new technology or other external influences, which had an impact on the work routines of the creative broadcasting industry and it's perception.

Will travel as far back as into the 60ies and 70ies, which I did last week, when I met with my first interviewees: Graham McCallum, Brian Eley and Martin Lambie-Nairn. Thanks for the tea guys, but mostly for the amazing stories and insight you shared with me. 
I cannot wait to transcribe our chats.

For now I am putting on my Christmas jumper (yes, the one with the red nosed raindeer) and will indulge in all the yummy things this time of the year has to offer. 

Happy Holidays and see you in, hopefully not so bumpy, 2017!

* it's been a while...

 ...since I ran around in Los Angeles to meet more interview partners on the West Coast. Sorry for telling about that only a month later. I was lucky again to meet the most interesting people who readily made time for me and this project. As we know, for busy people this always is quite a challenge, so thanks to all of you once more!
An amazing side effect for me was also that this way I got to places I had never been before - like the beautiful, somewhat historic city of Pasadena, the PromaxBDA headquarters office in a pyramid-like building right in the heart of Hollywood, or to this odd little assembly of family homes on a hill not far from the airport, overlooking a field of oil pumps on one side and the far distant pacific ocean on the other. I also explored riding the new fast train from Culver City out to the Science Museum to see the PIXAR exhibit which was really worth seeing.
Back to that fast train: who had ever thought that L.A. would build something like a subway, an elevated one here to get the millions of people who usually are stuck in traffic on freeways for hours on end...? Not me. This is really good. Very fast, comfortable and so much better for the environment - yay California!
The people I could talk with in L.A. were first Elaine Cantwell who gave me a great interview by telephone as our L.A. timing was one day apart from being perfect.
Once I had arrived in L.A., I first went to the PromaxBDA office to meet and do an interview with Steve Kazanjian, President & CEO of the BDA, who had also started out as a designer, but then found his talents and interest more in business and management - and this combination, I believe, is really supportive for the association, as he understands and represents both sides.

Next interview date: Juan Delcan who I was really lucky to meet, as he is busy directing commercials everywhere around the world these days. He - as many of my New York interview partners had already pointed out, was obviously the most imaginative and creative broadcast design wizard in the 90s and 2000s. And he definitely is an artist, maybe even more an artist now than a designer, as his free time from directing goes into most interesting paintings and objects.
New day, new place: Seesaw Productions in Culver City and its director and long time designer and producer Judy Korin - long standing experiences and design work are to be seen and felt there. After our interview she gave me that great idea to ride the new fast train which had a stop around the corner from her studio to get out to the Science Museum. Thank you Judy, that was great!
The next morning I drove out east of the city to Pasadena to meet Curt Doty who had been part of the Pittard Sullivan team (...it seems, most of the people I met in L.A. were, too). Curt had been in the PS design teams working on several of the PRO7-SAT1 channels in Germany in the 90s.
This little trip turned into an interesting review of the past with those historic Pasadena buildings,  Curt's memories and at the same time into the present as we had met in a new office building where lots of youngsters were buzzing around to get ready for a Halloween office party.
And then it was already my last day in L.A. before I was going to fly out west across the Pacific and south to Sydney/Australia. I got a last minute interview with Andy Hann, who made time for me on a Saturday - how good is that? He suggested to meet at "The Grove" near Beverly Boulevard. "The Grove" is a world of its own: a small and very fine open-air shopping complex with all kinds of brand stores with one of those elegant Apple stores in its midst. It felt as if any moment one of those Hollywood stars with big sunglasses in their faces would come along. Quite a special place – at the same time very easy-going, cool. Andy had made his way from being a designer – he had once been part of the famous Pittard Sullivan teams, too – to the very present fields of social media marketing and strategizing. He seems to have a lot of fun with it all and has some good leads and ideas on new ways for broadcast to go forward into unprecedented distribution possibilities via mobile media, apps and stuff we do not even know about yet. We might learn more about that as we go.
But of course this has not been all there is or was in the US. Some people central to the picture will szill get covered, interviews with a few more are being scheduled now, as possible dates for me in Boston, New York, San Francisco or L.A. just didn't match. And I couldn't travel for meeting everyone in all their respective places. The USA are just too big for that. But we can skype which is great for interviews, too.
Meanwhile my partner Carmen has been busy in the UK with some BBC heros - I'm sure she'll add some great information on how that went, soon. Stay tuned.

** filtering interview content

Hey - good news: my project partner is Carmen Alzner. Her picture and whereabouts will appear on the right side, soon!  

Together we form a small team of enthusiastic broadcast design and BDA-fans, who had the amazing experience of surging broadcast design during the late 80s and 90s and of becoming part of this utterly creative international community which developed out of the yearly BDA International conferences.

Carmen takes care of the UK colleagues (who had amazing influence in giving birth to the Quantel Paintbox), and the international outreach which started happening in the mid-90. Interviews in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the US have been run by me, with more in the US and Australia coming up during the next weeks.

Some of the people I interviewed told me how they had started working with cardboard and film camera in the late 70s before anything digital came into view. What they first encountered as broadcast graphics “machines” in the early 80s were typewriter-kinds of tools with which they "played", trying to develop something like “typo-graphics” or at times incorporated logos in their type chains.

At this time I am busy transcribing voice interviews and that way going through the so-far collected content, from which some rough topics along which a “technical” timeline can be deducted and organised. Like the design workings before Quantel, then new surprising creative power surges along the Paintbox-Harry-Henry and 3d-animation years, after which the creative take-off with experiments in those suddenly available (and definitely more affordable) open systems like Mac and Adobe software, especially After Effects (back then CoSa) for motion graphics happened. Presently we see ever smaller and more powerful storage and computing devices, and emerging from these technical achievements we now have everything at hand – from internet possibilities with HD to cloud storage  and consequently easy data exchange ...a never ending process.

Back to our topic: to us it looks like at least 3 generations of broadcast designers have been involved since then, and right now we look into new and interesting stuff happening with virtual reality, smart tools and tv in apps and on the web.

The question of what will become of linear tv tradition and connected branding and designing process is up again. However, this is not a new question…
As history is repeating, the same question about radio was asked when tv appeared some decades after radio had been thought to put an end to newspapers and magazines. All these media are still out there – maybe produced and consumed in different ways by now, but they are all still happening.

All we know at this time: change is in the air, once again, in the paradigms of what once was called broadcast and subsequently in broadcast design, strategy of distribution and perception.

* meetings and interviews across the USA

After a most interesting week in New York where I met and did interviews with several people who are still active in the field of broadcast design, strategy and other areas of media, I flew across this huge country to California.

NYC Interviews: Barry Rahmy, Mechthild Schmidt, Lee Hunt, Ellen Kahn, Patrick McDonaugh

In Los Angeles I already had several meetings scheduled, but - like in New York - whoever I got together with for an interview gave me more contacts to follow. This way I had the chance to get to know quite a few people who I had never met before and got to visit places I also hadn't been to before. Which is a really great asset in this "work & travel" project! Especially as everyone was incredibly accomodating, open to my questions and shared their precious time with me.
BIG THANKS to all you wonderful people – your support, encouragement and confidence with this project helps and energizes the process big time!
Had I known that the project would raise this much interest, I would have taken more time in the US. More and more people came into view who would have been great to meet, but I ran out of time, as my flight schedule carried me on to my next stop – Sydney. But there is Skype and I will get back to those who I couldn't meet in person to dig up even more good stuff with you.
So, a few days ago I arrived in Australia, where I will stay for the next few months, writing.
I am already busy doing transcriptions from those nearly 30 interviews I got done by now, which is a most interesting part of my work. It gives me the unique opportunity to dive into the widely diverse spectrum of creative media work you all are living with. Hugely interesting to see how individual paths developed from different starting points along time and how creative people deal with challenges given by life, economy changes, or - like especially at this time, politics.
Quotes and pics will follow soon.

* Interview quote 2

Yesterday I had the great pleasure of speaking to two very different people who have been in the field for many years. One of them is a vital part of what's happening NOW with the change in the way we watch tv and consequently of the way how networks need to look at the new "smart and mobile" behaviour of their viewers and react to it adequately. It is Lee Hunt, of Lee Hunt LLC, Razorfish; Lee Hunt Associates, MTV and so on... He has known this business for a very long time, rather than purely from the design side, he comes from creative strategy and management and at this time he is busy researching a large number of networks how they build paths into this new shift their viewers are rolling on. He asks and observes and he already draws some interesting conclusions:
"...how are they navigating people through different platforms?
How do you move people from linear television to on-demand? Or to what we call “tve" - “tv everywhere”… or to apps or to googleplay, and it’s been really interesting to see how these networks have done it. So much of it is the way they use their graphic style and manner and essentially their brand language. That brand language has to be used in dynamic and very unique ways, and when I look at a graphic – even if it hasn’t the network logo on it – because the network has been very consistent, reliable in its look and style – not necessarily dull and stodgy, but consistent: I get it! This is NBC, or it’s TLC, or whatever the network is, without even having to see the logo, just by the visual representation on the screen.
So this is the challenge and more even the opportunity right now for designers..."
THANK YOU, Lee!

* interview quote 1

...the first interview I got after arriving in the US was with Maria LoConte in Boston. She is a long-standing designer whose work has won many awards and doesn't end with broadcast design. She does all kinds of projects from editing to directing, consulting or documentary filming and adds motion design to the productions if needed. She stated clearly that, if you merely stick to graphic design, it won't take you very far in the various new and interesting applications of motion design. If you are not curious and interested in all kinds of arts and culture - be it painting, sculpting, architecture, performances of all kinds, music, dance, and staging in general, it's not going to be enough food for your creative mind and won't take you anywhere up this ladder. She put her thoughts about this as follows: "...if you’re doing motion of any kind, if you’re incorporating multi-media - in other words music and voice-over and pictures and sound and so forth and you only study graphic design, you’ll never go and create anything that has any kind of lasting value or emotion. If you don’t create an emotional moment in stuff that you do, it’s going to be disposable. And I think that when I go back to the people who influenced me the most it’s maybe the people that'd made me feel something when I saw what they did and it’s why this particular commercial by Apple with the Balloons as a most recent example of that is to me stunningly beautiful and perfect..."
THANK YOU, Maria!

* M.I.T. - where "digital" thrives into the yet unknown

I made my trip across the Atlantic ocean and arrived in Boston, or rather Cambridge, the heart of intelligence. My first day in wonderful early fall weather was dedicated to ride the bike through Harvard, then south into the huge M.I.T. Campus towards Charles river. Strange... at M.I.T., while strolling through sunny courtyards and the endless mesh of amazing architecture, reading short descriptions of what's going on inside the buildings, I feel a bit like when I encountered my first computer 30something years ago!  The founders' dedications and principles on the buildings make me shiver at the thought of endless possibilities arising with the multifold ways human intelligence works and of people who understand that their business billions are well spent here.
From visual arts to medical, biology, chemistry, mathematics, computung, learning, memory and cognition research and a lot more... this seems to be an endless field which gets continuously ploughed and explored here. I could spend days just hovering over amazing book titles at the M.I.T. press bookstore.
But I am not only here to read and study, but to collect interviews, so my US contacts will hopefully make time within the short period of my stay here. Several individuals who made a change in tv design are willing to tell me about it. This should be very interesting, as television in the US was always ahead of us. Europe had still been in war recovery mode when tv entertainment already was in full bloom here. And Americans know how sales work and that everything here has a lot to do with how the product is presented. Television, from the beginning, had to make money.  The actual beginning of television design and marketing happened here. And a lot more is happening here...
http://news.mit.edu/search?keyword=television+research&published_date_start=&published_date_end=

Bildunterschrift hinzufügen

*a sunny day in Zurich

A beautiful drive to Switzerland. Sunshine, blue skies, mist in the distant mountains of the already snowy Alps across the Zurich lake. And a warm welcome at Switzerland's big TV Station SRG by the chief designer there who readily sat with me, answering all my questions - in spite of workloads burning in the background.
Isn't this a weird business? We all work from nothing and when what we worked on has been aired, it is gone into nothing again. Very different from anything that can be produced from real material, can be touched and felt, and stays there... It is tempting to ask the question if whatever we "produce" in an immaterial sense always feels more stressful? As if real material, lasting across those fleeting minutes and seconds (...or even frames) we are constantly working with, would stay and last for ever. Not for ever probably, but longer than a tv moment, that's for sure.
Anyway – this interview was another really good experience! There was enough time to go through all the questions in detail and it ended with a really interesting look at what is happening at the moment with more and more people watching tv on their smart apps.
Stay tuned: soon I will offer some of that. But right now I am getting ready to travel to the US. ...excited to meet some more amahzing digital creatives and maybe quite different situations there. When it all started over here in Europe, we constantly looked across the ocean and were amazed at how far along that topic was there already. So – let's see if our colleagues in the US  have already found the ways to push tv design and branding into the next episode of media evolution...

* more voices and stories from German tv

After days without web access I'm online again. My home office router started corroding and getting a new one and that new one connected with our German Telekom is a special affair...
Amazing to think back to those days when we communicated and organized entire conferences without web acces. It just didn't exist then, but we worked it all out quite well in other – maybe even less stressful ways!
So – my second interview session in Cologne went really well again. I had the former manager and the former senior art director of the RTL TV Dpt. to discuss my questions with. Both are now lecturing at different universities and are looking across that past period of active production work in a similar way as I do. This obviously comes with lecturing... With both of them, it turned into a very lively talk. We started at the early beginnings when tv design was produced on cardboard and then filmed with a camera... or if you would create an animation, it would take days until you got the exposed film back and could see how it turned out.
The major innovation which came with Paintbox was that small buffer for instantly viewable cell animations, and then Harry gave a us a full minute of image storage. Today all of this is vastly different – we hardly think of anything like storage anymore. It's simply there and gets larger each day!
Something else when thinking back is the memory of a simple realization during the production of commercial spots: commercials for tv in Germany were usually timed
"750 frames", equalling 30 seconds. This was how I started getting a feeling for frames and seconds, for timing and time in general. It seems to fly away faster and faster now.
Today I'll head off to my next interviews in Munich, and then Zurich is on the schedule mid week. Meanwhile I've also been busy finding supporters and participants in the UK and US communities, who make me very happy by responding very well to this idea and supporting it with great contacts and ideas. I am thrilled to mention that Martin Lambie-
Nairn will be part of this venture, and Lee Hunt from NY sent me this great link which might be interesting for all of us: https://keyframesthefilm.wordpress.com/about/   
So far I didn't have time to watch it (and for the past days no web access...,) but it is described as pretty close to what I'm trying to do together with you all in this project.
However, it is a digital documentary film, and so, again – to find it in a bookstore or library might be too hard. I'm still all in with a book for this. It may sound a little pathetic, but I simply believe that books will last longer than web content.
Talk again soon, I'm off to Munich now!

*digging deep

Whew - a beautiful sunny ride through the South of Germany towards green and lush mountain regions takes me across the Austrian border...
What luxury this project brings along!

While I had figured that an interview along 15 questions would take an hour at most, this time I was definitely wrong. We ended up digging up memories from long gone days all afternoon, talking about past productions when we must have been in the same studio without a real memory of it.
Is this what digital age does to us? Fleeting moments - all along?
One more reason to get this project done and out into the world.

But never mind - this one developed extensively into an inspiring exchange of good stuff, from university work experiences and the general ongoing change in time, politics, society, life and of course, television, or rather: media in general and visions about what might come next... Really enjoyable and good all along.

If all my intended talks would turn into something like this, my project will take years...
so, no way! You might be threatened if I'd tell you that you'd have to give me a half day's time. No, no - at least not in general! This depends fully on the situation, time & place and your interest in giving it your attention.

Here is the list of questions, so you can see and start digging in your past for yourself.
If you'd rather write about it, let me know. Of course, you can just do that and send it to me if there's no time for a face to face talk. Just don't forget to add some pictures...

Interview:

1. brief introduction to who you are, incl name place, actual work situation.

2. when and where did you start turning to "digital" with your work?

3. what was before / what lead to your first touch with digital graphics?
    did you study design, fine arts or anything else?
    or did you "slide" in without specific pre-formation // did you get in "playing around"?

4. were there important triggering moments, influences or people on your path?

5. did Quantel's Paintbox and/or Harry have anything to do with your entry
    to the tv design world?

6. when and what was YOUR first design job for tv?

7. for which stations or agencies did you work?

8. are there any moments of total high // total frustration you remember?
    and how would you describe those events?
    what would you rather never experience again?

9.  how did these events influence what came later?

10. which new developments in systems, which new design software triggered you?

11. were there specific new design trends you remember as being influential
      to your work?


12. ...any designers who impressed you // you followed? any "milestones" there?

13. which young talent // which contemporary agency do you observe?

14. when you look at the paradigmatic changes in use and perception with new,
      smart media - what do you think does this require in television marketing & design?

15. what has to happen in tv design  in order not to get behind in the face
      of these changes?
     

*interview appointments in process

After many of you have responded and signalled to be willing to share experiences and tales about individual paths into and through the years of developing tv design and creating branding processes, I am moving forward by planning interview trips to the South, East, North and Northwest of Europe.

My first stop this week will be in Austria's beautiful "Vorarlberg", a pre-alpine region which forms the Eastern part of Austria, bordering on the lake of Constance. If the weather stays as brilliant as it has been these past weeks, it will be a wonderful trip to this part of Austria. There I will meet the creator of the very first sat.1 logo, the famous rainbow ball!!!

During my very first year into this business in 1986, I happened to be working (or rather practising ;) at a Munich-based studio, when he gave birth to this logo right there, before my eys! The sat.1 logo – with a few adaptations into the present – pretty much kept its look until today. Only faintly did I remember who this young guy was, manoeuvering the then brand new digital video image tool "dvi", the latest new toy in the studio's ultra modern post production table, as I was still completely new to this entire technical context of digital production for tv and video – but curious enough, wanting to know it all. Lately I kept pondering and wondering if I do remember this guy's name right. And I did - at least his first name... :)
I am really excited to finally meet him in person after 30 years – both of us meanwhile teaching at universities in similar programs. I'm sure we'll have some stuff to share.

As I will then already be South, I will cross into Switzerland and head to Zurich, where a former tv design buddy of mine is head of ... at the Swiss tv station "SF".
He was called to Switzerland shortly after he managed to create and produce an entirely new look for Germany's second oldest tv station, the "Second German TV Station" ZDF in 2001. His design, too, has been alive unchanged until today, and if you know what that station's logo looked like before, you can see quickly what a creative and courageous change into a really modern look was behind this process of total renewal.
We might hear more about that when I get the chance to talk to this great guy who has since then been swamped with work there, but managed to give a rather conservative Swiss tv station a clear face lift. As this is obviously a continuous process, he is busy as ever with his work there, so I have to keep all fingers crossed, that he will squeeze me in between his other duties.

For next week more appointments are lining up in and around Cologne, after which I plan to go to Berlin where I actually started my research  tweo weeks ago and where I had this highly interesting talk with the ex-program director of DW ("Deutsche Welle"), the global network supplying the whole world with news from Germany. He has witnessed the birth od German television if you will, not only from a design prepective, but also from a huge historical and political point of view.

And I will hopefully get to meet the longtime creative force behind ARTE plus another colleague of those first years in "digital paintboxing", who started just like I did – as a paintbox operator on "the other 1st Quantel Paintbox" in Germany! In 1986, Quantel delivered 3 pieces of their first generation of their famous Paintbox to Germany. One (...and soon the second one...) was/were in Munich, where I had then just started my working experience, the other one in Duesseldorf, where my Berlin friend was the queen of digital graphics, and one more at the NDR tv station in Hamburg, where it was mainly used for the big daily news shows "Tagesschau" and "Tagesthemen", and of course, the most cherished weather report.

So, we can look forward to more news on this evolving and exciting story – stay tuned!

*day 2 of sending this idea out into the world

WOW!
Thank you all for these positive and interesting responses to my first mailings with the blog link.
Obviously no one wants to post their comment right here, but rather respond by e-mail.
That's fine – as long as I do get as many reactions and replies as I do... ;)
But as some of you have asked how to help and how this is going to happen, I'll give you some news about my ideas for next steps right here.

Of course, I've been plotting about how to go forward with this in more detail, but I first wanted to hear and feel into what you all think about the idea in general. And if you'd be willing to join in this project. I'm very happy to say that pretty much everyone who I sent the link to, be it European, UK oder US colleagues, responded positively.

I am still fixing the feasibilities of getting in touch for face-to-face talks and reviewing material.
Several trips will have to be made, as I'd rather speak to the participating individuals in person.
If that is not possible due to circumstances, we can set up a skype date for an interview at you ease and timing, or I'll set up an interview online and you'll send me the image material via internet.

My intital idea for organizing and structuring the content is to to work along each participant’s individual paths, so it’s also going to be a bit like an autobiographic reflection of your professional career paths. How did your individual path start where did it curve, where did it hit some highs (and possibly also lows)...?  So there will be quite a bit of reflection involved which I hope is taken well by all willing to participate.

I believe that these kinds of stories are what triggers interest in each kind of audience – more than just seeing awesome color pictures and titles, which, of course will accompany the individual interviews. But I want this also to be about "life-and-career-story-telling", as each of our lives has been revolving so much around this area of creativity and excitement. So much for today - I'll keep you posted!
Thanks again for responding and again: feel free to comment!!!

*call for tv designers to participate

 *this is a call for cooperative participation in collecting tv design work from the 1980s until today. The main goal of this is to prevent all that good stuff from getting lost in the digital void and to make it accessible for young generations of screen designers.

The idea of sampling and publishing a collection of tv design work from the mid-80s,  when we all faced the beginning of digital graphics, until today in our all-encompassing digital life has been on my mind for a long time. With an upcoming sabbatical I now have the opportunity to start making this a reality, but I can't and won't do it without you.

You all have done outstanding work in the field. So – if you feel similar about wondering where it all went and are interested in seeing it published, I am asking you now to join into a cooperative effort to create a compendium of great "historic" tv design material. You started out contributing to the broadcast industry as a creative individual during that time and were/are part in the competition of the delivery of new images, videos, sound and outstanding creative ideas. You may ask yourself a similar question as I do: "...where did or does all that work go in the end?" Yes, some of it might still be sitting in the back rows of our shelves, on outdated vcr tapes, other great work may have its only place in our memory. This is about to change. I am asking you to go digging.


*visualizing constant change in tv design – tell your story

We all are aware of how many stations or channels changed and thrived due to a new design image while others died or were merged with other stations due to diverse circumstances. We all met year by year at the BDA conferences, which in the earlier years – until the mid-90s – happened only once a year in the US and there we always enjoyed a sparkling review of amazing work and conversations, made friends for life and what not. And do you remember Michael Eisner's enthusiastic prediction during his keynote speech at the Orlando/FL conference in 1993 of the soon-to-come 500 (and more) tv channels ? This made a huge impression on me, in spite of - at the time - I thought this guy seemed to be quite a bit "out there..." in Disneyland. Well, whatever my little understanding then made me ponder way back then – we all set out to work on exactly what he had predicted and created audiovisual corporate designs for those new stations all over the world. Each year brought along new ideas and created new trends in how to represent the latest design hype on screen for new tv stations and channels.


*We have stories to tell.

How did you happen to be in that business? Remember where you came from, what you set out to do and where your adventure led you to? Addressing these individual whereabouts – simply telling about our sometimes unusual career paths already could be thrilling and inspiring young ones to go for it... Many of us collected awards which are most probably still sitting on some office shelves... collecting dust? Our VHS tapes with the awarded clips from then will hardly play on any of our present devices and from some of you I heard that they already eliminated their digital tapes.



*stop that for a moment!

So much has happened during those years – some of us are still in the business, others (like me) went into universities, helping the youngsters to grow into this meanwhile completely digital world and others are done with their working career, enjoying their retirement – creatively, of course ;). With tv now merging into the internet, using social media and is presented through other new and unprecedented communication tools, the permanent change of looks, needs and strategies for tv design, branding and marketing is open again for the next big adventure. To me it feels as if the present time is marking the end of one era and the next big change in our kind of work - happening as I write this. So – it's time to look at where we came from and appreciate it together now.

My dream is to turn all of this into a cooperatively written, edited and printed publication from where QR codes lead to the creative work that you hopefully will be able to dig up and are ready to share.
My side dream is to manage to store all the good stuff you bring to the table on a database which I hope can be installed at our university.


*one last word

Still - you may think: ”…why publish all of this in a book when there is the web and everything could be uploaded at ease?"
Reason 1: The general lack of literature on the topic. The reality I perceive during literature search for my lectures: there is very little valuable written and printed stuff on tv design out there. Douglas Merritt's book on tv graphics from 1983, Martin Lambie-Nairn's wonderful book on branding television from 1997 and two later studies of German and Austrian broadcast design from 2012 - black and white print without pictures or illustrations is all I find relevant. Oh yes, there is this one great collection of work in "Type in Motion”, put together 1999 by Jeff Bellantoni und Matt Woolman and there are some interesting articles in the web.
Reason 2: The disappearance of digital data. Today a book represents more value than any contemporary online publication which you now may find awesome and bookmark in your favourites, but soon forget. A book has its place in your life, on your shelf and in libraries and endure many more years than a website.
Reason 3: The younger generations. Students of media design like the ones I teach who want to explore the field of design in television with true material can't find more than those few valuable books mentioned above and digital data are spread out on too many internet channels under too many key words – very confusing.
Said enough.

Now you think about it and share your thoughts here for each one invited to this blog to read, comment and re-comment and exchange. Then we will find out together how we can pursue this best. I have some ideas but first want to hear what you all, whose first reactions were utterly positive, think and share. Feel free to share this link to others who might be interested!

*thank you in advance!