Design

For quite some time now, legend Stefan Sagmeister is offering his Instagram-platform to aspiring and established creatives from various fields.

Studio Deutsche & Japaner sounds like Dolce & Gabbana and what the two of them do have in common definitely is a lot of style. The Mannheim-based studio has proved its puristic and playful style while working for the likes of Jay Z, Nike or Saint Laurent. A holistic approach to a wide spectrum of creative fields as well as the worth of collaboration is essential to the designers at Deutsche & Japaner. We met Julian Zimmermann of D&J for an interview talking about sources of inspiration, teamwork and current projects. Also, catch Deutsche & Japaner at Forward Berlin!

NEWFORMAT is a team of design experts of various fields based in Berlin. With their focus on interdisciplinary exchange within different artistic, cultural and technological forces in the context of contemporary disruption, they create one of a kind animations, videos and creative concepts for their partners. In the past years, they’ve released various projects and campaigns for clients like Ottolinger, Beats by Dre, Adidas, and Highsnobiety x FARFETCH.

For Forward Festival 2021, FOUND Studio created ‘Threshold’, a film exploring the relationship between physical and virtual worlds, for our Main Title Sequence. We’re going to take a look behind the scenes and find out how FOUND, led by Creative Director Clayton Welham, and created by the two superstar designers Olly Johnson and Ionut Lupu, brought it to life.

If you see playful yet minimalistic designs in popping colors that are fondly animated, chances are design studio Illo is behind it. The Italy-based collective was founded by Ilenia Notarangelo and Luca Gonnelli back in 2012 and since then has grown to a team of 15 people, all of them thriving on getting the best out of the combination of design and technology. Before their talk at Forward Festival Hamburg, we had a chat with Ilenia Notarangelo about what’s behind all those fun animation designs.

Mix up the digital with the analogue and you get a hybrid. The two counterparts don’t just coexist but bring out the best in each other. Mixed reality studio Artefact makes our analogue reality more exciting by adding digital details. The Vienna-based creatives are the ones behind the Forward App, which gives the festival the augmented experience.

If you have ever wondered whether your personality is more important than your portfolio, artist Erik Kessels has a very clear answer for you: yes. Creatives are very good in the works they create but often lack the ability to communicate about it and about themselves as artists. Erik Kessels' masterclass at the Forward Festival Hamburg is here to change that: In an exclusive on-site masterclass, Erik Kessels will teach you how to make your work stand out from the crowd, no matter what industry you’re in.

Agency Wieden+Kennedy has been at the forefront of bold and strong advertising. You know, that kind of advertising that gives you goosebumps, really gets under your skin and gets you thinking about the bigger picture behind the spot. We talked to Zeynep Orbay, Creative Director at Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam and the one responsible for impactful ad campaigns for the likes of Nike and Montblanc, about what’s behind those strong advertising campaigns. For the first time, Zeynep Orbay will speak at the Forward Festival Hamburg this July.

Mirko Borsche is known to set trends within the industry and in order to have reached this status with some of the most relevant designs for Supreme, Givenchy or lately football club Inter Milan, the creative has a reputation of always being on the go. It’s no different when we catch up with him for a quick talk about his latest projects, his sources of inspiration during a pandemic and his upcoming talk at Forward Festival Hamburg. “This is Mirko speaking”, he says when we reach him, of course, in-between two meetings. So what has Mirko Borsche been up to lately?

Movies are not only moving images, they also have the power to move something in us, a fact that no one will deny. Why shouldn't that also apply to design? In the Adobe workshop "Putting design in motion", Robert Hranitzky, motion graphic designer, will show you how to get your designs moving with Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro - and maybe even your viewers?

With his newest exhibition at Thomas Erben Gallery in New York, design-icon and Forward Festival speaker Stefan Sagmeister reflects a world seemingly out of control but sheds a light on actual improvement in our society - the Sagmeister way. His new body of work uses data to paint a more uplifting picture of the world.

Sarah Illenberger gives new meaning to everyday objects. With her interdisciplinary approach combining design, art, photography, and her hands, she has found a niche in the creative world. In her hands-on masterclass at the Forward Festival Hamburg she will focus on how to work analogue and to use your hands as a thinking tool.

Found Studio did a rebrand and it’s more than just a facelift: Behind the shiny new logo and a whole new visual presence, there is the culmination of a year spent evolving as far as creative processes, studio direction and collaborations go.

Bradley G. Munkowitz aka GMUNK is no one less than an industry legend. With 20 years of creative experience, the visual design director has always been at the forefront of innovative digital design and pushing the boundaries of multidisciplinary art.

It’s here! The 2021 Forward Festival Main Titles by Found Studio just celebrated its release and wants to inspire people to keep moving. In this interview with Clayton Welham, creative director at Found Studio, he told us about the idea and concept behind the clip, technologies, and challenges his team faced when creating the Main Titles.

Team Hamburg meets Team Vienna, two teams, four artists, and two blank canvases are the setting for the digital live art battle happening at the Forward Online Festival hosted by Fritz Kola.

Esra Gülmen is known to beautifully illustrate everyday struggles, that we have with ourselves and our lives. With her series “Don´t I look Turkish” she presented a very personal project dealing with first-hand-experienced racism and prejudices. As head of design at Heimat Berlin and a member at ADC Germany, Esra Gülmen is an artist with all her heart.

Ines Alpha likes blurring the frontiers between reality and fiction. And by being a 3D makeup artist she makes reality more fantastic and surreal. We had a chat with Ines Alpha about her 3D makeup routine, Kim Kardashianesque beauty standards and about creating an Alpha planet.

Forward Festival and Found Studio want to motivate creatives worldwide with their new clip. All the big visions, ideas, and dreams we had for 2020, let’s make them become reality!

Frustrated by the current set of emojis available, New York design studio & Walsh created emojis suitable for the design industry, picturing the Zeitgeist of 2020. Developed earlier the year, at the end of 2020 they are more up to date than ever.

The Centre for Impossible Media shows that pretty much everything is possible with virtual art. The project is a collaboration between Universal Everything and Human Studio and is a VR exhibition platform for visionary artists.

In cooperation with the London-based production studio The Mill and Art Director Raj Davsi, the unique short film “The ODD One Out” was produced on the occasion of Forward Festival 2019.

Lego redesigns the world according to how children see it: Renders by architect Dara Huang show the reimagination of community buildings.

Digital Design Studio TeYosh teamed up with web developer Rifke Sadleir to create their newest project for Cinekid Festival - an interactive web experience about consumerism, climate change, and sustainability.

Difficult times call for extra solidarity and extra initiatives to support those in need! That's why the design legends at Karl Anders in collaboration with the modernist Bavarian craft beer company AND UNION have launched a new creative initiative to support the Hamburg-based Kitchen Guerilla with their project #SoliKüche.

In late summer, ONLINEPRINTERS and Forward launched an open call for posters focusing on the one topic that has never been more accurate than in 2020: Creative Crisis. We asked creatives what they were doing during Corona lockdown? What has been their inspiration, who has been their muse? We wanted to see how a worldwide crisis made them creative and how COVID-19 affected their artwork. No matter if the piece was created during the lockdown or right after.

Micol Talso is the Art Director of Toiletpaper Magazine, a label that can be applied to a variety of objects and situations, starting from a magazine to a party, a girlfriend or a design object. We spoke to her about Toiletpaper as a project, her workflow and how to juggle several roles in life.

 The presidential elections in the US are approaching rapidly and campaigns are arising to motivate US citizens to participate in the elections and make use of their voice. OBEY founder, Shepard Fairey, has designed a series of posters starring Snoop Dogg for the voting initiative 'Vote With Snoop'. Together with the voting advocacy groups RockTheVote, 1VoteCloser, and social justice initiative OneOpp, the rapper and Fairey are trying to mobilize US citizens to go and vote on election day.

 The Forward Festival Vienna is just around the corner and we are already hungry for all the exciting inputs from the most creative minds of the industry that are awaiting. For the first time, there will be a Livestream of the festival! As a little foretaste to the upcoming festival we have something special for you today!

It's 2020, it´s corona and art becomes silent. How to make it loud again? The Area for Virtual Art knows just the way: By presenting digital and AI-based art, using the internet and its hyperlink-based nature as a new environment for exhibition and communication. The newest digital art space launches tomorrow, 9th September, within the frame of Ars Electronica!

After sharing your artworks on our Instagram feed for five years now, we are excited to announce that the Moon Exhibition now has its own website! Created by the team of Readymag design tool, it has turned into a proper exhibition showing over 50 artworks by up-and-coming creatives. Submissions are possible anytime and can be uploaded quickly and easily at moonexhibition.com under submit.

Jessica Walsh is the founder and creative director of &Walsh, one of the few creative agencies around the world that are led by women. She talked to us about sexism in the creative industries, role-models and her approach to dealing with stress. This is an extract of the 2020 Forward Print Magazine. Find the full interview here.

Now, more than ever before, it is vital to find alternative solutions for artists, photographers, illustrators and designers to present and sell their art. Fortunately, more and more of these platforms have been popping up and we'd like to introduce one of them: Art Aid.

Graphic artist, print-maker and designer Anthony Burrill is best known for his “Work Hard & Be Nice To People” poster. The thought-provoking phrase has become something of a mantra within the design community. It reflects the persuasive and up-beat style of communication that we connect with Anthony’s work and that we have all come to love.   Interview by Marco Markovic

The Moon Exhibition Lockdown Special aims to support the creative community during the crisis by connecting them and giving them a platform to express their ideas.

Wes Anderson's graphic designer and Forward Festival speaker Annie Atkins used her time in quarantine to share lighthearted lessons on how to get through the lockdown in a 'fake' poster series.

The Moon Exhibition Lockdown Special aims to support the creative community during the crisis by connecting them and giving them a platform to express their ideas.

The Moon Exhibition Lockdown Special aims to support the creative community during the crisis by connecting them and giving them a platform to express their ideas.

The Moon Exhibition Lockdown Special aims to support the creative community during the crisis by connecting them and giving them a platform to express their ideas.

Normally, at this point we would usually be going mad preparing the last details for Forward Festival Vienna, which would have taken place next week. Instead, we're all facing unprecedented challenges due to the coronavirus pandemic. While sitting in our home offices and coming up with ideas like the Lockdown Special to try and support our community, there is good news: we are very happy to announce our new date for Vienna and our partnership with Virtual Design Festival on the 17th of April!

The Moon Exhibition Lockdown Special aims to support the creative community during the crisis by connecting them and giving them a platform to express their ideas.

The Moon Exhibition Lockdown Special aims to support the creative community during the crisis by connecting them and giving them a platform to express their ideas.

Since we are all stuck inside, we thought it would be a good idea to bring the Forward Festival to your home! Eike König believes education should be for free, therefore his talk is the first one for you to enjoy.

New festival topics always open up new possibilities for us at Forward. For this year's DIGITAL EYES, we aim to extend your reality with our AR App and now also our with our Instagram face filters. A few days before the first festival, we do not have one but three face filters created by Allan Berger (@ultrakawaii4000) and Maximilian Prag (@maximilianprag). Have a look at them and try them out on our Instagram.

When Drieke Leenknegt started working for Nike, sneakers were something you bought for doing sports, period.  At a time, when there was no such thing as hype around sportswear, when nobody would even have dreamt of people queuing for a pair of shoes.

The last week in Vienna was all about the country's biggest tennis event: the ERSTE Bank Open 2019. Besides the triumphant win of the Austrian superstar Dominic Thiem, once again the trophies came into the limelight.

Graffiti artist Banksy says he has been forced to open his own homeware store following a legal dispute involving a greeting cards company. The new store, called Gross Domestic Product sells art, homewares and disappointment to randomly selected buyers who must answer the question: “Why does art matter?”.

Lately we haven't been able to get to work without noticing certain posters all over town. With the start of the new season at Burgtheater, quite a lot has changed; not only the program or the people working on it but also the entire look and feel. Less of a fortress, more of a theatre, more inter-, less national. Artistic director Martin Kušej is on a mission to erase the term „Burg“ for Burgtheater - a vision that needed its visual identity to go along with.

At this year’s Forward Festival in Vienna, Munich and Hamburg, Forward and fritz-kola launched an open call for black and white posters. Out of numerous submissions, we selected 10 that were presented at the festival venues.

London-based ecoLogicStudio is an architectural and urban design practice specialized in environmental design, urban self-sufficiency and building integrated nature. One of their newest project installations is the urban curtain for Climate-KIC, the EU's most prominent climate innovation initiative. The curtain is called Photo.Synth.Etica and was built to capture CO2 from the atmosphere.

Hugo Livet, Paris-based artist and designer, made a surprise discovery by NASA to his newest inspiration. He imagined broken off ice-chunks as his raw material to digitally create geometric sculptures, capturing the beautiful structure of those icy giants.

When you talk to Christophe, you soon realize that he doesn’t waste time, which you can also notice in his art and and products. Not content to wait for manufacturing tools and companies to meet his ideas, the industrial designer is part of a new generation of creatives who develop their own production processes. We sat down with Christophe to talk with him about his career, his passion for good products and much more.

At a 400-year old ruin in the little village of kKgatika on the island of Paxos, German artist duo Quintessenz used over 120 shades of color to create the illusion of digital pixels.

American sculptor Ken Kelleher is specialized in the creation of large scale digital sculptures around the world. Digital works are set into real landscapes like streets, galleries or small places, and the result seems incredibly real.

Cool Shit strikes again! In their latest work, you can explore the inside of the mind of R&B musician Bobby Brown, who was once married to Whitney Houston.

At this year’s Forward festival in Munich and Hamburg, Forward and fritz-kola launched an open call for black and white posters. Out of numerous submissions, we selected 10 that were presented at the festival venues.

From the 11th to the 15th of July 2018 an unusual sight presented itself to New Yorkers at the Brookfield Place. Jason Hackenwerth’s exhibition “Animal Soul” stunned children as well as adults.

This week, we visited the “100 Beste Plakate” exhibition at the MAK, the museum for applied arts in Vienna. We know that 100 posters are just too much. That's why we guide you through the highlights of the exhibition.

In 2017, the furniture retailer MADE.com started an exciting new project named TalentLab. The crowdsourcing and crowdfunding platform gives young and emerging designers the chance to see their prototypes realized in large-scale production. We had the chance to get to know Romain Deberle, Shan Penghao and Russel Jarvis, who participated in the first MADE TalentLab collection.  

At this year’s Forward Festival in Vienna and Zurich Onlineprinters and Forward launched an open call for posters focusing on the 2018 festival topic "Construct - Deconstruct." Out of numerous applications we selected 10 posters that were exhibited at the festival venues.

So…what’s in it for me, Adobe XD? Is it free? Yes it is! Just recently, the May update for Adobe XD has been released with a big bang: introducing the new Starter plan, you can now work with Adobe XD fast, easy – and for free!

The Scottish design director Ruth Wassermann runs one of the most intriguing platforms for budding designers in the moment. She is the head of design of MADE's new crowdsourcing and crowdfunding platform TalentLab, where young designers can submit projects that they would like to see realized. We had the chance to sit down with Ruth and talk with her about the idea behind TalentLab, the first collection and her vision for the future of living.

During the Milan Design Week the city in Northern Italy is in a state of emergency. Every year, the world's largest furniture fair and countless exhibitions, installations and design events attract interior fans and design enthusiasts from around the world to Milan. The industrial designer Rainer Mutsch was there this year and summarized the latest trends of the Milan Design Week 2018 for us.