After a contemplative Christmas time I say goodbye to 2011 with a look back into my childhood, and my first editorial design object: Impact

Impact was a youth/boulevard/internet/…- magazine appearing at least 8 times from 1998 on, designed and written by me (and my editor, ghostwriter and brother Jens). It was appreciated by a large audience: Stefan, Max, Furkan, Melina and Katharina, who spent one Deutsche Mark and 50 Pfennige for relevant articles and an exquisit song choice in the Impact-Charts.

Here are some extracts for you (click to enlarge). Happy new Year!

“Impact Gossip: Are Britneys boobs real?”

The joke page (right) graphically quotes the early œuvre of stardesigner Eike König

“Are you a coward?”

Kindly Kasper wishes everyone a spooky Christmas!

If you have some time, check out my online portfolio, created with the really nice new platform salon.io:

thilokasper.de

Watch my friend Casper on Youtube: Link

My first illustration for enorm 2/11. An instruction for young social entrepreneurs.

1. see problems, find solutions

2. get economic knowledge

3. tap alternative financial resources

4. define rules and responsibilities

5. social motivation can ease hard times (No, he doesn’t delightfully slap his ass! He shows him the way to a better future!)

Layout and illustration of a 10 pages sustainable-investment-special in enorm 3/11. A fair interpretation of Monopoly, building kindergartens and hospitals instead of hotels, and driving an electric Tesla right to the GO field… in lovely colors.

Illustration and layout of a sustainable-construction-special in enorm 4/11. Or: How to sneak Moby Dick into a business magazine…

Illustration for the latest enorm Magazin: enorm-magazin.de

“Kuhlmann ist Künstler. In den 90ern hat er in eineinhalb Jahren fast dreihundert Werke seiner Serie ‘Liebesbilder’ verkauft, heute malt er seltener, nur wenn er ‘Phasen’ hat. Er sagt, seit 15 Jahren schon drehen sich seine Gedanken um diesen Begriff: Sharety. Die Philosophie des Teilens. Die Auseinandersetzung damit ist sein Kunstprojekt. ‘Ich baue eine soziale Skulptur’, sagt er”

Kuhlmann is an artist. In the 90s he sold about 300 pieces from his series “Liebesbilder (Love Pictures)”. He currently paints less, only if he has “phases”. For 15 years his thoughts have been circling around one idea: Sharety. The philosophy of sharing. The issue is his art project: “I’m creating a social sculpture”.

Der Zehnte den Bedürftigen, enorm Magazin, Ausgabe 4 / 11

More about this art: Here (it’s really worth a look!)

The portrait didn’t take a lot of time so maybe I will make 300 more. During my next phase.

Once upon a rhyme

Can money be green? Yes it can! With a little time and cress seed…

… or, as sent in by my favorite reader:

Here you can see me drawing the cover illustration (by Mehrdad Zaeri) of the current enorm issue on our studio window.

Long time no new content on the blog, I’m sorry. But there was a lot of stuff going on. Literally a lot of stuff that I had to put on a wagon to get my possessions from Karlsruhe to Berlin. It was an adventurous trek but now I’m here, finally living and working in only one city. So you can meet me either working for enorm in their studio or in betahaus, working on my own (mostly university-)projects. Hopefully I will soon have the time to put more things I recently produced online – until then, go buy enorm 2/11 and open page 46, 47, 48 and 92 (and the rest of the pages of course!).

Thank you all for your kind messages, it’s good to know that my works are appreciated. See you soon!

Oh yes, this actually is my moving car. I know.

Some pictures of our university’s annual exhibition from last year. Together with Pixelgarten we made a cubistic summerhouse party.

This year I am not part of the curating team BUT I’ve prepared Art Generator for you! Based on Beuys “Everyone is an artist” you are welcome to produce one of 1001 unique pieces of real art! Come visit for the grand opening: Tuesday, July 12 at 7pm, HfG Karlsruhe.

My contribution to the human rights logo contest.

Eventhough there are already quite a lot of good logos on the page, none of them (including mine) is able to really communicate the idea of human rights. This makes me wonder, if there is an actual need for such a logo or if this issue is too complex to be expressed in one symbol.

Two weeks ago I attended an interesting symposium on design theory at Kunstakademie Stuttgart (“Was kann Designtheorie leisten?“). One of the speakers, professor Regula Stämpfli from Brussels, talked about branding and how insufficient logos are to embody a whole institution / city / country. There is a reason why our forefathers and mothers developped abstract letters and language, when they realized that our world was too diverse to be described with symbols.

Nowadays there seems to be nothing art directors love more than turning things into symbols and brands. Villages, parliaments, people, regions, … recently a movement of despairing citizens of the city Hamburg wrote a manifesto against the municipality’s attempt to turn Hamburg into a brand. They shout out: Hamburg is a city, not a brand!

Putting a logo onto something means to define something. And the process of definition always goes along with a process of exclusion. E.g. in the human rights logo contest many logos work with an image of equality – but equality is only one of many aspects of human rights. What about the rest? One way would be to make the symbol very abstract (like a heart). But I think that human rights are different from love (heart) or peace (peace symbol). Human rights are not abstract. They should not be open for interpretation – they should be fact.

Of course there are cases in which brands make sense. And of course I have the feeling that this contest for a logo for human rights is something good, bringing the topic of human rights into the minds of many creative people around the world. This is why I want to take part as well.

But maybe the result of the contest should not be an actual logo for human rights. Maybe it will be a discussion, a wave of support for human rights movements. Or maybe an addition to the collection of human rights:

Everybody has the right to be no brand.

My HfG fellows Julia and Viola produced this clip two years ago (when I started to study in Karlsruhe).

How nice that they put it online now, shortly before I leave our Karlsruhe heterotopia, finally moving to Berlin to work on my own projects and for enorm. And to become an actor (just kidding).

Another project for the interaction-design seminar of Luna Maurer and Jonathan Pukey at Rietveld Academie. This time, the assignment was to create an internet-meme.

My approach: In 2008 Andrew J. Elliot and Daniela Niesta publish their survey “Romantic Red”. Their conclusion: Red enhances men’s attraction to women. Who’d have thunk? What’s really surprising about their examination is, that a red frame around the photo of a woman was enough to make her appear way more attractive than without the frame.

To me this information sounds like the perfect start for a facebook meme. Reformulating the scientific findinds in a more flexible way, I made the red frame project accessible for both: men and women.

Anything connected to a red frame is very attractive.

As I was not patient enough to wait for the success of my facebook meme, I wrote a graphic fairy tale in pictures, of a red frame capturing the world…