Stahl R

What is the story of the studio ? TR: It's a bit of a story. I'm running the studio together with Susanne Stahl who's also my partner. We run the studio since two years now, maybe a bit less. We had some history before that. I was for a long long time working with HORT the agency (which used to be in Frankfurt, now in Berlin) and Susanne was working at Fons Hickmann M23 in Berlin. Then Susanne decided to do her master at the RCA in London, so we moved to London for two years. She finished her degree and straight got a job at the University of the Arts in Berlin. And since she's teaching part time at the university, we decided to come back to Berlin and lived here again.

How do you see yourselves in five years ? It's a very difficult question. I mean being partners of the studio is one thing but we are partners in the real life as well which obviously adds a different kind of level to it. We used to travel a lot and change places. The world how it works made it possible for us to work from somewhere else. But now having a little kid, we are a bit grounded in Berlin, and it's a good thing. So I guess in five years we'll be in Berlin.

What is your relation to the other berliner studios ? Because we live in Berlin for over such a long period, you get to know most studios. We are mostly related to the people of the agencies we work with, which is HORT, and many many of our friends work there. There is a lot of formal HORT members who now run their own studios. There is also the Fons Hickman surroundings who works together. That’s the basic areas of people we know. But you connect naturally with the people that work in the same area you live in.

What is your relation to teaching ? And what advice can you give to young graphic designers ? Susanne is teaching part time which is a large part of our practice because she is teaching two and a half, sometimes three days a week. I was doing a lot of workshops with HORT, thinking of concepts of how to run workshops in a short period which I enjoyed very much. So, our relationship with teaching is pretty deep and we have to see how we want to continue that in the future. But it's definitively something we enjoy very much. These short form of workshops are intense periods that I highly recommend. School is a bit off reality because over a semester the track get often lost due to all the courses you have to do simultaneously. I think workshops are a very good tool to discover a certain approach of working. Interview conducted in February 2015 ©ktlg