Eps51

What is the story of your studio ? BW: We are Eps51, a small graphic design studio based in Berlin since 2008. We work mostly for clients in the cultural field which means we develop visual identities for art institutions, art projects, exhibitions, galleries…This is what we mostly do, but we also have clients in the commercial field, fashion, lifestyle and music. In the last ten years, we concentrated a lot on typography, and if you look at our work, you can clearly see that most of our projects are based on typography and experimental type.

Why did you choose to work in Berlin ? Sascha and I studied together in the south of Germany, and during our studies, we traveled a lot. We lived and worked in Cairo, London, Brighton, Paris. At some point after we finished our studies, we got the chance to work on a project together and at same time we founded Eps51. So we needed a place to work from. For some reasons we wanted to go back to Germany, we had three cities to choose from, and we simply came to Berlin because it used to be a cheap place to live in. It took quite a long time to set up our network here. There is too many graphic designers here and it is a very hype city at the moment, that is why a lot of creative people come to Berlin. There is obviously a lot of people coming here right after studying so they don’t really know what their work is worth… which means whenever we write a quote, somebody will do it for half the price. That’s a fact. It takes a while to make clients understand what the work is really worth. Most of our clients are in Berlin but we still have some clients out of Berlin since we are involved in international projects.

Do you think proximity with clients is important in the graphic design field ? I think it works both ways, locally or remotely, as long as communication works. If clients are used to communicate through Skype and if they are good in communicating what they want, then the job is going to work. Sometimes it is just easier to grab your computer and visit the client, of course. But I don’t think it is a problem to work or live in different cities.

With the standardization of softwares, do you think that nowadays everyone can become a graphic designer ? What is your relation to new technologies ? Well, everybody can download photoshop and all this programs nowadays, and the problem is that respect of graphic design kind of disappeared with it. On the other hand, a tool doesn’t make you a designer. Holding a pencil in your hand won’t make you an artist, holding a camera in your hand doesn’t make you a photographer… So standing in front of a computer with a few programs is not going to make you a designer. Basically, the quality of who designs out there is getting worse because everybody is trying to be a graphic designer. But they are not, obviously. We do offer websites as well but we decided not to do coding at all. What we do is we focus on our work as designer, the concept, the visuals… but of course, if you do the concept of a website, you have to understand the technology you are working with. It is part of your work to know what you do, to know what is possible or not. And technology is always evolving, I remember a time when you could only use two or maybe three typefaces online. It is a wide field, it is one of your obligation, if you want to be a good one, to know about new technologies. Interview conducted in February 2015 ©ktlg