Website: maxkickinger.de

Max Kickinger, a Salzburg-based composer and sounddesigner asked me to create him a new identity.
It was important for him to get an identity that’s not connected to any trends neither should it create the feeling of a big sounddesign studio with hundreds of employees. His name and personality should directly influence the identity and describe him as a person. So we spend some mornings in our favourite café in the city of Salzburg chatting about ourselves, ideas, everyday-stuff, coffee, wine, and future plans. I really enjoyed it and soon the main concept was ready to be visualized.

A bold and solid yet timeless typeface with some characterising changes became the main logotype. Next to it a “subline” provides the basis for individuality and personality. Max has got the possibility to change that line to his needs to create a statement with his name. Varying from the most serious line “music + sound design” to some more individual ones like “und Moritz”, “loves to hear from you” and “will make you dance” the stationery developes personality.

Colourwise we sticked to his former colours black, white and yellow to keep some continuity but I tried to spice things a bit more up. So now his letters are completely yellow at the back and his envelopes are completely yellow at the front.

Besides the printed matters I also created a wordpress-based portfolio website. It is separated into a business (white) and personal (black) work section. Combined with custom typography and some fancy lightboxing he got a smooth running easy and fast to use website.
To continue the personalized statements Max also has the possibility to enter matching lyric-quotations which are randomly displayed at the top of the website.

visit Max: maxkickinger.de

Website: fifth-music-com

fifth music & sound design is Matthias Hacksteiner. He basically does – you’ll be surprised – everything that’s connected to sound: sound branding as well as compositions for motion graphics or different video formats. Recently he even finished his first album.
While his album was produced under the alias amongst giants he needed an identity for his company fifth music & sound design to give his professional work a proper appearance and setting.

fifth is a musical expression describing the sequence of five consecutive notes. That became the foundation for the identity developement. In addition to that the musical system is based on five stave which led me to extend the five circles into rounded lines.
For the typography I tried to quote the appearence of musical symbols like “forte fortissimo”, “piano” or “mezzoforte” but kept it a bit more quiet…

I also wanted to connect to the modern and innovative sounds fifth is producing for his clients with the clean subline and the different translations.

To complete the identity I generated (based on the number 5) some key visuals for being used in modern media implementations. Starting with a CD/DVD label I also used them as a random background-element on the website or for animated graphics. Since they are quite a nice eye-catcher they could also be very well used for t-shirts, caps, stickers et cetera in the future.

For the showreel I brought the logotype and the generated lines to life to create a simple opener, outro and separator. The sound (from fifth music & sound design of course) underlines the animations very well!

[See post to watch QuickTime movie]

Using type on websites has always been quite a pain in the neck for me. Implementing custom typefaces with flash (sIFR) might seem like a proper solution but there are often problems displaying them – particulary since the adblock plus extension for Firefox is gaining more and more importance (which I think is totally right). So for the fifth music website I used a technology that was totally new to me: typeface.js This is a font rendering script based on javascript and works out just fine!
The website is based on wordpress to let Matthias keep you up to date easily and write interesting stuff on his weblog. Have a look at www.fifth-music.com

Finally here are some close-ups from the printed matter to give you an idea of the great paper Matthias and I chose for his stationery.

Silberstern Luxusautovermietung

Wedding website for Teresa & Florian

Website for Kathi’s Conjure me project (only flash-programming)

Website for the Schopenhauer school in Vienna

During my studies at the UAS Salzburg tobé, THai and me created a poster-magazine and its identity.
The magazine contained artwork submissions from all over the planet.
David hepled us developing the website (really worth a visit) to make it fit the magazine’s folding concept.

While working at LAVA T-Mobile wanted to claim the basic printing colour Magenta in the Netherlands and some other countries. They even started to take some companies to court that used Magenta as their primary corporate colour.
Ridiculous, right? Right.
So Lava started an initiative against these claims. And I was responsible for giving this initiative its online-voice.
What first started as a lunch-idea became quite a big thing and many important designer and manager postet their opinion on T-Mobile’s attitude.
Besides the huge amount of hits on that website I first noticed their importance when a friend from Germany sent me the link.
After my time at Lava the Austrian Broadcasting Service (ORF) called me to ask some questions about the freemagenta initiative because they did a tv report about these Magenta-claims (as you will notice it is in german):

You can still have a look on all the comments and on the visual postings as well as you can order a little LAVA-boekje they did afterwards that documents the whole initiative:
www.freemagenta.nl

While having bloody delicious lunches at LAVA they got the assignment from Mainline to create a campaign. That campaign should make people around the Netherlands aware of the HIV-epidemic in Asia. The main theme of the campaign was “spread the word befor the virus” and it was called “infact_”.
Therefore a small book with thematic illustrations and photographs was created and spread around Holland for free. Of course there also had to be an online-presence for that campaign which was my duty.
In Addition to that we also did “outdoor-activities” to spread the word. Some posters were placed, some artworks were seen on the pavement and somehow a lot of freebie-newspapers at the Amsterdam Centraal Station were infected with yellow stickers by some early birds…

For the book I illustrated the connection between the biggest drug-smuggling-routes and the HIV-infection hot spots:

www.denieuweepidemie.nl