Auch für das Jahr 2022 habe ich wieder einen Wandkalender gestaltet und in einer kleinen Auflage für Familie und Freunde drucken lassen. Der Kalender kann hier frei als PDF zum Drucken (für private Zwecke) auf DIN A4 Papier heruntergeladen werden: Kalender 2022: Schmetterlinge von Jacob Hübner (PDF, 18 MB) Der…

Während der Corona-Lockdowns der letzten Monate lag das öffentliche kulturelle Leben weitestgehend brach. Eine Kunstform ist in dieser Zeit jedoch aufgeblüht: Graffiti an Mauern und Hauswänden. Offenbar hatten viele Jugendliche und junge Erwachsene wenige Möglichkeiten ihre Freizeit zu gestalten. Zusätzlich hat ihnen der Distanzunterricht an Schulen und Universitäten vereinfacht spät…

There is a very good digital exhibition currently available online: John Heartfield – Fotografie Plus Dynamit. In Germany Heartfield is well-known for his satirical photomontages from the 1930s mocking Hitler and the Nazis. The virtual exhibition provides the opportunity to learn more about the person behind these photomontages and his…

The many nuances of the color white have been on my mind lately. Some time ago I visited an exhibition of monochrome white paintings by Qiu Shihua (read my blog article here). At first glance, these painting just seem to show white canvases. But when looking for longer times, extremely…

The Data Visualization Society’s (DVS) first conference Outlier 2021 took place on 4th, 5th, and 7th February 2021. It was organized as an online conference, joined by about 1000 participants from their computer screens all over the world. 41 main talks, about 20min each, were presented, as well as dozens…

Currently, ideas, notes, and image material I would like to write out as blog posts are piling up. Writing a good blog article with a well-structured text, suitable image material, and clean references may take me a day of work or more. But I currently lack that time. So I…

Für das Jahr 2021 habe ich wieder einen Kalender gestaltet. Der Kalender basiert auf dem Prinzip der phänologischen Jahreszeiten. Die zehn phänologischen Jahreszeiten werden aufgrund von Entwicklungsstadien von sogenannten Zeigerplanzen im Jahreszyklus definiert (mehr Infos siehe unten). Pro phänologischer Jahreszeit hat der Kalender ein Blatt, auf dem die zugehörigen Informationen…

Da sämtliche Museen im Corona-Lockdown im Winter 2020/21 wieder geschlossen waren, habe ich die Gelegenheit genutzt um mir die öffentlich zugängliche Skuplturensammlung im Essener Grugapark an zwei aufeinanderfolgenden Wochenenden intensiv anzuschauen. Mein Eindrücke schildere ich in diesem Artikel auf Lokalkompass.

The Museum Folkwang in Essen hosted a big retrospective on Keith Haring from August to November 2020. I visited this exhibition mainly because I was interested in his highly recognizable and simple graphic style. But what struck me is that Keith Haring‘s art emanates a very specific Zeitgeist. His art…

Recently I bought myself an IKEA Poäng as a comfortable armchair for reading. I’m quite fond of the chair. For the low price one gets a pretty classy looking piece of furniture. In the Bauhaus year 2019 I had already learned a lot about modernist furniture design. Researching a bit…

Visiting the art museum Gelsenkirchen recently, I came across a small exhibition of prints by Anton Stankowski and his associate Karl Duschek. In German design circles Stankowski is mainly known for having designed the logo of the Deutsche Bank (see below). Looking at the exhibited prints, my impressions wavered between…

Geodata with timestamps can be beautifully visualized as animated maps. My main tool of choice for creating such maps up to now has been QGIS with the Time Manager plugin (examples see here, here, and here). Some time ago I came across another promising free and open source tool for…

During the current Corona pandemic, museums and exhibitions everywhere are closed and will apparently stay so for the next weeks or months. Visiting museums is something I already miss. A longer bicycle tour to a museum is my standard Sunday routine. Because I am always working from home as a…

Information graphics should be designed for the target group they address. This is common good practice for any graphic design. The series of infographics shown below provide the rare opportunity to see the same informational content designed for four different target audiences: the age groups of preschool children, school children,…

The Red Dot Design Museum in Essen currently has a special exhibition on Simplicity as a Design Principle (until 06.03.2020). In this article I summarize the main messages of this exhibition. The Red Dot Design Museum’s ongoing permanent exhibition shows products that have been awarded the prestigious Red Dot Design…

As in the two previous years, I again designed a calender for 2020. The calender shows seasonal flower illustrations by Pierre-Joseph Redouté (1759 –1840), who is considered one of the greatest botanical illustrators of all time. The calender is freely downloadable as a pdf file and printable (for private use)…

An article I wrote about data visualization and board games was published in Nightingale, the journal of the Data Visualization Society. In the article I summarize my thoughts from a visit to the biggest tradefair for board games in the world, the Spiel (Internationale Spieletage) in Essen. Board game designers…

In my own designs and those of others I admire, I keep gravitating towards the simple and minimalist. From my own experience I can say that such designs are rarely the result of a simple design process. Taking a straightforward approach usually results in a blunt and uninspired design. A…

Currently I’m trying to extend my skillset to also be able to construct basic infographics and illustrations from scratch. One of my preferred graphic styles for clear minimalist infographics and illustrations is the ligne clear („clear line“) style. The style is notably associated with „Adventures of Tintin“ comics by Hergé…

The infographic below shows a comparison of the pictograms of contemporay artist Julian Opie, and graphic designers Rudolf Modley and Gerd Arntz. While Arntz and Modley depicted members of specific groups (professions, socio-economic groups), Opie uses a very similar design language to depict individuals. I created this infographic after visiting…

The infographic below shows the evolution of German traffic signs from realistic contour drawing to abstract pictograms. The principle is demonstrated using selected signs. The signs introduced in 1992 are those still in use today. During bicycle trips in remote areas I often see old traffic signs which to me…

Ever since I visited the Bauhaus archive and museum in Berlin many years ago, I am a fan of Bauhaus design. However, my understanding of what „Bauhaus design“ actually is was rather vague. In the last months I had the opportunity to visit many further exhibitions which are commemorating the…

Having taken care of the main bureaucracy involved in starting to work as a freelancer, and after having set up my homepage, a further task on my to-do list was to develop a basic corporate design. Many freelancers do not use an explicit corporate design. A freelancer is himself his…

Lately I’ve been studying signs of all types, notably traffic signs. I noticed that German traffic signs use only basic color combinations of a handful of colors. The picture below shows the three most common color combinations. I estimate that about 70 percent of functional signs in Germany use these…

The ruhr region (Ruhrgebiet) in Germany was a center of black coal mining and the steel industry. In the last decades all black coal mines and most heavy industry sites have been shut down. Nowadays the low rents in this densely populated urban region attract startups, artists, retaurants, and immigrants.…

I recently designed an advertising beachflag. Such classic graphic design tasks are usually not part of my work. But in this case the assignment came from my mother who sells self-produced honey, marmelade, and similar products on local markets. To my surprise I learned quite a few things about what…

The free software Google Earth Pro Desktop can be used to create flyover and flythrough videos of real-world 3D cityscapes. Timed data of a tour can be shown within the visualization. In this article I explain how I made such a video. I realized this project in the context of…

The supermarket chain Aldi Nord replaced it’s one-way plastic bag by a more durable version in february 2019. I bought one myself and am quite fond of the design. It is simple yet refined enough to be interesting. The picture below shows the side without the Aldi Nord Logo. For…

QGIS 3.X includes a 3D map view (View -> New 3D Map View) which was developed by Lutra Consulting. The functionality to create flyover videos is integrated in this view. This can also be used to create panning and zooming videos of conventional maps. In this article I explain how…

Monochrome images, that is images in which only shades of a single color are used, have a nice reduced, minimalist look to them. When the saturation and contrast between used shades is low, the images seem airy and ephemeral. The effect can for instance often be seen in black and…

At critical mass events bicylists meet and drive through a city as a convoy. This creates awareness for cycling as a mode of transport. I logged the january tour and turned the data into an animated map: Due to rain the tour was shorter than usual, taking about 83 minutes.…

In the last weeks I have been searching for the calender equivalent of a Bauhaus style watch. Such watches, notably those designed by Max Bill*, are functional and free from decorative elements. They have a timeless elegance about them. Available German office calenders, for example this Brunnen calender, lack elegance…

At critical mass events bicylists meet and drive through a city as a convoy. This creates awareness for cycling as a mode of transport. The following animated map shows the Critical Mass tour through Essen in december. Based on the previous animation for november, I identified some patterns of how…

Dot-matrix displays have a nice retro-futuristic look to them. Here is an animated data chart I made based on this look. The chart shows the result of the federal parliament election in the German federal state of Hessen on the 28.10.2018 and compares them to the previous results of 2013.…

At Critical Mass events large numbers of cyclists meet and drive through the city in a random way as a convoy. This serves to create awareness for cycling as a mode of transport. I logged the route of the november Critical Mass in Essen and turned it into an animated…