*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!