** 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.