*...back at work, back to "reality"...

...the big adventure of travelling and meeting great people all across the globe is over for now. Back in Germany, back in university life, I am processing the huge amount of interviews with broadcast creatives from all thos places and countries while I am lecturing and supervising student projects again – things have been slowing down...
Recently, at a meeting in London with my project partner and friend Carmen we found ourselves sorting through old books and image material while structuring what we think would be the right sequence of a timeline along the technological evolution and consequently ever new design possibilities which are strongly connected with those new tech tools, for our tv design adventures book project.
The narrative will roll around the creative individuals' stories who had entered the broadcast design field from very different angles all around the planet during the mid to late 80s, and about how we all ventured forth, testing ourselves and fiddling with the permanently emerging new digital production and creation tools. It's good work in process and we hope to be able to find a good publisher once we have sent out a great exposé and file about our tv design adventures.

* ...European designers

European broadcast designers: as I havent't found the time to talk about my very first meetings before I set out to travel, this post will finally bring some of that content back, too. When I first started to put the idea about this project out into the world, the first tv expert I had the chance to meet and greet, was the former director of Deutsche Welle in Berlin, Dr. Claus Grimm (4th pic from left). He thought that the project was interesting and worthwhile which actually everyone else then, did, too. ☺☺☺ As Claus had been much more the political and managing director than a design person at DW, he offered to connect me to the designers he knew and gave me a few valuable contacts.
A little later I started for real. My very first design meeting in September 2016 when I had just kicked off the project on this blog and with mailings out into the world, was very special. It happened in Austria, where I went to meet someone who I had watched creating the very first logo for SAT.1 in 1986 at the Kirch technical center in Munich: Markus Hanzer (1st pic on left). 
I had then just been out of art school and had landed my first job in Munich at those Kirch headquarters which soon turned into the empire of the European broadcast situation and later changed the the world of European tv channels all together. Leo Kirch had just started the very first private television channel, PKS which was to turn into SAT1 soon after.
Being the total newbie in that post-production studio, I spent night after night practising with the Quantel Paintbox, to conquer its many great features in order to really make it my tool. Markus had already been working at ORF graphic department for a few years and was recommended for his talent and experience by the ORF director to Kirch Media. I watched him working and was amazed. And now, 30 years later and quite a bit older, meeting again and remembering some puzzling situations there and then made us laugh a lot. How good is that?!? Quite a moment, and perfectly right to kick off this collection of stories about tv design creatives and their individual paths and encounters with digital technology I am after. Markus is the designer of that well-known first edition of the rainbow-colored SAT.1 ball, which came up while playing with the color bars and the effects of a brand-new digital tool in that studio which could make tv pages turn and form balls out of flat screen images. He added some selected type and BAM – it was done!
When we met again after all those 30 years, he told me that he had worked there for a few years after I had left for my next job at ARRI TV. He worked out all the designs of Kirch's new tv stations. SAT.1 was soon to be followed by PRO7, then Kabel 1, then the sports channel DSF, and in the years later many other channels emerged, creating that big private tv channel world which was predicted by some already early on when others still shook their heads in disbelief. After those years he was part of the DMC agency, founded by Neville Brody and Hubert Schillhuber, working out of Vienna, Hamburg and London and now, he, too is guiding students into their design professions at FH Vorarlberg in Dornbirn and at the Vienna university.
Two other long-time tv designers I met in Munich in September 2016 were Andrea Bednarz (4th pic from right) and Barbara Simon (2nd pic from right), both of whom started in the late 80s – early 90s and have been working on many successful tv brands since then. Barbara worked with PRO7 for a long time, she became head of the in-house design department at "Broadcast Center Unterföhring" and is now working on her own in brand creation and brand communication.
Andrea had come from that station, too, and after a few years of work experience she started the successful agency Velvet together with Matthias Zentner. Velvet created many very interesting and award-winning international designs, amongst others they did that for "Al Jazeera" in Kairo. Some years later she started another company Luxlotusliner with a friend and colleague, which again  remains a successful design agency.
In Cologne I had two RTL heroes in one interview: Manfred Becker (3rd pic from left) who started the design department at RTL when that station started, managed it and grew his work into many branding strategies, until he retired sevral years ago. However, as a non-stop action man, he continues to lecture creative concepts in motion design to students at film academy Ludwigsburg.
His younger colleague Ralf Lobeck (3rd pic from right), grew into a design director at RTL television and meanwhile to a professor position at the Fashion Institute in Cologne. In the mid-90s I had met them regularly at the BDA conferences in America, where actually everybody took their inspirations and put new creative ideas to work at the home stations.
Then it was Zürich to meet another colleague and friend from my earlier years in the public tv design department of SDR. We had worked together on several jobs before he went on to the SWR station for a few years and in 2001 was called to ZDF to be the art director who changed the old style design of that huge public broadcaster into a young and fresh image, drawing a younger audience. Soon he was head hunted to do the same for the big Swiss television station SRF (now SF), and this is where until today he has been governing the creative branding and marketing department, moving new design strategy processes at Swiss quality and speed ;-)
And last not least London! Here is the home of the idol for all of us European broadcast designers, the good old BBC, which since what seems forever – even before digital times – has been producing those subtle, "very British", intelligent and funny ideas which go straight to viewers' hearts and makes them connect emotionally with their station – that was it and still is it. Great work through all ages.
The man I would like to call the "all-time-best-tv-branding-artist" is Martin Lambie-Nairn, who I just last week, at the European broadcast designers conference in Cologne, had the pleasure to have lunch with. Martin today calls himself a dinosaur in tv design, all the while continuing his great work on designing and branding companies, still carrying that one principle he has been applying throughout his work: "...if ideas and designs don't reach people's hearts, they're worth nothing."
At the BBC Broadcast Center in London I had the pleasure to interview Jane Fielder, senior art director at RedBee Creative, that award-winning design company which grew out of the BBC inhouse design department. Jane was lucky to work alongside Martin for some time, and also calls him her biggest inspiration. It is just about how Martin's ideas work and his way of putting form into function that makes us all look at him in awe like a living legend.
Big, big thank you to all for sharing your time and stories!

* broadcasters down under

The European winter in 2016/17 was well spent in Australia. That time included meetings with several broadcast creatives in Australia: Diane Costantini from ABC Television; Gabe Christie, Michael Murray and Chris Cross from Network SEVEN; Tatiana Opachdy from Network and a skype meeting with TVNZ New Zealand broadcast creative Jens Hertzum. These Australians had been working with that amazing country's biggest networks for many years and it was very interesting to hear how it all started there and how things are going today as our big wide world seems to shrink to that "global village" with online communication taking over and new platforms for content viewing pop up as we speak.
We are still busy with transcriptions and summaries at this time – so hang in for some good quotes coming soon all the way from the other side of the world...

*outlooks and visions from then to there

While transcribing the rich interviews I took during the past weeks and months, I come across stuff which is most interesting. I just finished working on an interview I did with Steve Kazanjian at the PromaxBDA headquarters in Los Angeles in October '16. Steve is part of the "second generation" of broadcast designers who took the industry from  high-end, expensive technology to open desktop computers. Surfing that front tip of the second wave of broadcast design, he soon found out that this motion design and campaign design stuff was not going to be enough for him. He started to look beyond – definitely more strategically into the business part of all this and shares some interesting viewpoints about how things developed from there and how it could go from here:

"The challenge for all of us now is: how do you asethetically and creatively push that industry forward, given that it's not the 90s anymore and you can't do what you want to do as much?

And how do you still express as much extraordinary and memorable work within that new space? And centrally important, how do you validate it to make sure that what your assumptions were, was right? That is really exciting!" "...the next breed, who calls themselves "Microtiques" - as in micro boutiques, are not freelancers. These are people who have come from larger shops, larger agencies or networks who are now downsizing to 1-2-person agencies. Whether it’s design, audio, sound, editorial, writing or whatever... The interesting thing about it is, that there is a lot of commonality in that with what we’re seeing in the giga-economy in general....  Whether it’s AirBnB, Uber or similar – that whole kind of crowd-sourced behaviour… It’s scary but it’s also exciting. It’s scary, if you’ve got 500.000/month of overhead that you have to move through, but it’s a march that is happening at the moment that you can’t stop. It’s either going to go very large or very small. But it’s going to afford an extraordinary amount of work and creativity, too! There has never been a more extraordinary time to be in entertainment marketing or in design, specifically for entertainment, because of more content being produced than ever before and there’s more money coming into this industry than ever before..."

...here we are – 2017!!!

HAPPY NEW YEAR to everyone! And a very warm welcome to Carmen in the blog!
Even warmer greetings – literally – 😅 from "Down-Under-Land"! It's summer here, and it's HOT!!!
I had the great pleasure to witness the New Year arrive with those famous fireworks in the Sydney harbour! But you won't have to go without it in case you're curious to see...
Here is a link with even better views than what I enjoyed tremendously from a friend's beautiful home's big balcony, overlooking the harbour with that bridge being the center of attractions! Following the link to the video documentation produced by ABC TV Australia, you get camera shots from all sides of this amazing harbour:

www.abc.net.au/news/2016-12-31/sydney-to-make-it-rain-purple-to-honour-prince/8155836


 Enjoy and stay tuned!!!