An der Ampel steht ein hagerer junger Mann im Unterhemd, über die Schultern eine dünne Lederjacke geworfen. Seine kleine Freundin hebt die linke Seite der Jacke an, steckt ihren Kopf unter die Achsel des Mannes, verweilt kurz – und dreht sich eingeschnappt weg. Die Ampel wird grün. Sommer in Berlin.
May: Designers, Friends, and Amateurs
Or: This month basically was as gloomy as a song by The National.
There is one tag line by Frank Chimero, which I often use as a personal excuse for everything that goes wrong in my life. “Professional Designer, Amateur Human”. This works perfectly for the past month: May.
It’s the moment in which I am sitting on the concrete stairs in front of Berlin’s “Haus der Kulturen der Welt”, a beautiful location right inside the city’s biggest park. The annual TYPO design conference takes place there. And while the conference was a huge success — we as the editorial team wrote over 70 blog posts for all the talks — I am sitting there, on the stairs, under me the silver reflections of the shallow water, and for a brief moment I have the feeling that I am loosing control of my life. It slips away. The moment is short but crisp and clear, and after it, everything seemed different. So I call my friend Eva.
She visited later that month, and as I wrote about how important it is to acknowledge the awesomeness of people who surround us: Eva really is awesome. Talking to her for ten minutes makes me motivated for life, it makes me curious and courageous, and everything seems doable and acceptable. Even if the whole conversation spins around a problem where we both don’t know the solution for: It makes me feel less like an amateur. Thanks for that.
Three other great people are Roman, Sebastian and Beate, who’s documentary about young philosophers was screened for the first time in Berlin last month. I lived with Roman when they started editing the material back in 2014 (!), so I knew bits and pieces. But the final movie turned out really wonderful. It makes the process of thinking visible, and manages to not be boring for a single second. The audience at the screening were mostly philosophy and cultural science students, and I learned: philosophy students ask a lot of questions. One of them wanted to know about the initial motivation to make the movie. I loved Sebastian’s reply: “I asked myself: Which movie do I have to make, that everyone else would simply fuck up?”
This was a key moment for me. A moment about relevance in creative work. A key to making purposeful things. There is so much design in this world that is useless, and so many valuable ideas that are so badly designed. Maybe because of all the amateurs. Sorry, this newsletter was messy, but so was May. Hopefully June will be better.
April: Palaces, a trip to Milan, and one decade
This blog turned 10 years in April. What the?! It started out as a crappy Blogger blog called “Blogski Christowski”, then I moved it to WordPress, and eventually ended up on Tumblr, because I once thought mobile blogging would become a thing. It didn’t though. Micro-blogging became a thing, and all the blogs I used to enjoy as a teenager disappeared. The only things people really blog about these days are green smoothies, fashion and the death of blogging. Everything else is on Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, you name it. But I like it here. I like the old school flair the word “blog” pours. And I am glad some of you are still around. Thanks for that.
April was packed: I went to Milan for the first time. It’s a nice city (even though my friends mentioned through-out the trip how different Milan was to other Italian cities). What I don’t really understand is Italy’s coffee culture: You enter a café, order at one counter and pay (even if you haven’t decided for your type of croissant yet), then walk to another counter and choose the croissant, and finally order again – at another counter – the coffee you initially ordered. You have to drink it while standing in everyone’s way though, because if you sit down, the coffee gets really expensive. I don’t know. If you’re used to Berlin’s artisanal coffee-brewing craftsmanship, Italian coffee simply is nothing special.
We went to the furniture fair, Salone di Mobile, but realized that 24 halls full of chairs and brass side tables are too much to handle. We mainly were fascinated by the first halls; the “Classics”. Everything there was a bit too much (understatement of the year): Gold, marble, heavy curtains, a champaign bar that electrically rises out of a palatial wooden table. There is so much luxury in the world that we can’t even imagine.
More Milan: 150 years after Da Vinci finished his gigantic and famous mural “The Last Supper”, someone cut a door into it, and Jesus’ feet were gone. Like, who would do that? In German museums, you are likely to be expelled by the museum attendant if you don’t keep a safety distance of two meters from an exhibit.
Three more thoughts that popped up last month:
Always leave with the mindset of leaving for good. If you are a nervous traveller, do not think about the fact that you have to go back again. That thought pollutes the whole trip. Travel and think, Ok, I’m going to stay here.
Concerts are poems, really. I went to see Akua Naru, without knowing her, and I was sure that her music wasn’t really my kind of music. But her show was brilliant: A mixture of rap, jazz, mellow and loud, connected by a well-crafted narrative. Which is really the most important thing for a concert (and the reason why I hardly go to any concerts anymore).
All palaces are temporary palaces.
April was not only busy, but also decision-heavy. I wondered: Can decisions really be wrong if you decide to always make the best out of it? May will show us. I’m off to catch some sun now.
On Designing Books Well
Ein schönes Beispiel dafür, warum ich etwa 80 Prozent der Bücher des vergangenen Jahres auf englisch gelesen habe: Links im Bild die englische Originalausgabe von William Zinssers “On Writing Well” – rechts daneben die deutsche Fassung des Autorenhaus Verlags.
Zinssers vielfach überarbeiteter Ratgeber rund ums Schreiben hing schon seit Monaten auf auf meiner Amazon-Wunschliste. Die Bestellung der englischen Ausgabe hatte im örtlichen Buchladen eine Lieferzeit von zwei Wochen. Natürlich hätte ich einfach auf ›Bestellen‹ in meiner Jackentasche klicken können – aber man will ja den Einzelhandel unterstützen, und so bestellte ich die deutsche Ausgabe, mit dem tristesten Cover, das man sich vorstellen kann. In dem Buch geht es um Persönlichkeit in der Sprache bei Sachtexten! Dabei ist dem deutschen Autorenhaus Verlag wohl die Persönlichkeit der Umschlaggestaltung abhanden gekommen.
March: Technological relations, the world’s oldest social housing complex, and faux marble
Since I started cycling to work, my phone usage has gone down about one hour per day. In March, I spent over a full day—roughly 26 hours—on trains. That gave me the chance to catch up on some podcasts and articles I saved within the last weeks.
In context of the Apple/FBI lawsuit, I really enjoyed this story by Loney Abrams called “Larping off the grid”. Set in 2020, where wearable devices are mandatory for every citizen, she explores the idea of disconnecting yourself from constant connection. While just a couple of days ago the FBI claimed to have hacked a terrorist’s locked iPhone (after fighting Apple who refused to create a back door to access the data), the story considers the necessity of hacking yourself OUT of technology, rather than IN to it. Which, I think, is an interesting idea, and I can relate to it: Who doesn’t know the urge of setting the phone to flight mode and hide it in the drawer for a couple of hours, just for some peace and quiet?
Technology is so weird: We created something that stands in a constantly oscillating relation to ourselves. My friend’s parents bought a robotic vacuum cleaner. When I joined them at the dinner table, they were talking about it, about it’s efficiency and noise, how it knows where the stairs are, and how it makes the edges of the carpet uneven. As I missed the beginning of the conversation, I did not realize immediately that we were talking about a machine, not a human.
Later this month: Over easter, I visited my parents in Augsburg. Seven years ago, I could not wait to leave it behind me, but now, with a certain distance (and my parent’s new flat much closer to the city center!), I can see it’s beauty. Augsburg is known for the Fuggerei, the world’s oldest social housing complex, located right in the middle of the old city. People still live there, for 88 cents rent per year, with the requirement to be catholic and to pray three times a day.
When we visited the Fugger chapel close to the amazing weekly market, I noticed the beautiful walls made out of some sort of “faux marble”. Created with the Scagliola technique, a mixture of minerals, glue and pigments, it features vivid patterns and a shiny surface. The creation process makes the material much more precious than real marble, and that alone is a reason to love it.
I started being more cautious when it comes to surfaces and materials. Working in the digital field, my main fabric are pixels, and there’s not much variety to them. Getting inspired by textures from fashion, paper (remember the paper grain web design trend a couple of years ago?!), and nature helps refreshing the eyes. Nature always helps. Spring is here. Happy April!
By the way: If you enjoy these monthly ramblings, you can sign up to my e-mail newsletter here: Christel’s Corner on Tinyletter. ✨
Über Gesichtsausdrücke
Ich habe mir vorgenommen, zukünftig mehr auf meinen Gesichtsausdruck zu achten. Unter großer Anstrengung neige ich dazu, die Augenbrauen angespannt nach oben zu ziehen: beim Radfahren im Gegenwind, beim Justieren von Buchstaben, beim Drehen einer Pirouette. Selbst beim Zeichnen eines Gesichts nehme ich unweigerlich den Ausdruck der zu Papier gebrachten Figur an: angespannt, kreischend, fröhlich oder zu Tode bestürzt spiegelt sich ihr Antlitz in meinem.
February: Muscle Memory, Snapchat, and Roger.
It’s February 29, shortly after 11pm. I’m sitting in Berlin Prenzlauer Berg, on an old but comfortable IKEA sofa. This day was a rare one. I hope you made it count!
So. February. I changed my phone’s passcode in the beginning of this month. I’ve had the same four-digit-code for at least four years, and as my phone does not support any form of biometric identification, I need to keep typing that code to access my device. What I was not aware of though was the strength with which this code had been woven into my muscle memory. After 29 days, and over hundreds of unlocks, my thumb still is not quite able to perform the new numeric array. The struggle is real!
Sticking with phones (topic-wise): The new qz app got quite some attention in our office slack and in my twitter stream. Basically, it’s a robot that texts you the news. In a messenger-like interface, it provides short bits of information, and offers either questions to learn more on the topic, a link for further reading, or another piece of content. While the tone of voice is friendly and human-like, I only used it once for curiosity reasons, and never again.
What I started using more during the last month was Snapchat. We all struggled in wrapping our head around the confusing, basically also non-existing interface (swipe here, tap there, accidentally send an ugly selfie to a stranger and close the app in frustration), but I started liking it after a while. It’s nice to get so close to people’s lives, almost observing them, letting them carry you around their everyday life through the phone’s front-camera. While there are some really good snapchatters like my friend Eva (? hurraeva) or Cecilia (? motionandgrowth), who only use it when they actually have a relevant story to tell, it’s mainly a channel for nonsense and gibberish, which, honestly, is quite nice after a long day of work. Let the others do the talking. ? christowski1 (lamest nick name in the history of nick names.)
Also nice after work: swimming. Listening to this podcast by Marcel and Eva (it’s in German). Reading through this beautiful and in-depth article by Robin about a new approach on web typography. Watching every interview and TV show on YouTube that has Roger Willemsen as host or guest.
His death earlier this month truly saddened me. I have been in awe of his work ever since I started writing; his way of telling stories and embracing life‘s oddities has been a true inspiration during my last ten years (I wrote about one of his readings nine years ago on this blog). When he passed away, so many beautiful, admiring and sad articles had been published, and they got me thinking: How do we appreaciate someone’s existance while they are still with us, without being overly emotional or pathetic? How do we let them know we appreciate the work they do, and the time they share with us? I find that hard sometimes, oftentimes.
Roger Willemsen wrote a quarterly column called Willemsens Jahreszeiten in ZEIT Magazin. Here’s the archive. Even though there won’t be a new column this spring, we have one thing to look forward to in March: Daylight saving time. “Es wird Frühling!”