Show & Tell: Eike Konig talks us through some of the objects he prizes most

Eike König set up Hort in 1994 under the name Eikes Grafischer Hort – Eike’s Graphic Design Playground. It was intended to be a vehicle for his burgeoning design career but has since become something more complex; a creative club where participants collaborate on client briefs while simultaneously maintaining practices of their own. It’s a recipe that’s brought great success over the decades and seen Eike head up projects for the likes of Nike, Universal Music, The New York Times and Walt Disney among others, constantly developing and evolving his graphic language with the participation of an ever-changing team. We went to his Berlin apartment and studio to find out what objects he keeps close to him and how they’ve shaped him over the years… “I don’t actually have that close a relationship to objects,” says Eike. “I’m not a fan of collecting things and putting a lot of history into them. I like to let things go. It helps me to lose weight and to look forward because all these things remind me of something in history, but they don’t really help in the now. I don’t have a car and I don’t need status symbols, so I chose these objects from the perspective of my own biography. They’re still loose – it’s not like a narration from the first object to the last where you’ll get my whole story – but they’re kind of based on my experiences and remind me of moments that changed my life a little bit.”

1. Trivial Voice: Movin’ Over This is the first record sleeve I designed when I was working at Logic Records in Frankfurt. I was doing an internship there and it was the first time I was designing for music and the first opportunity I had to do professional design on the computer. When I was at university they would occasionally let us work with computers, but you had to book two-hour slots as we only had five of them available for all the students. They’d just tell us to sit down and work out what we could do with them. At that time there was Photoshop 2 or Photoshop 1 and we had these filters and plug-ins that would let you do cheap 3D renderings of balls and surfaces. Back then Frankfurt was one of the main centres of techno music and I was working for one of its biggest record labels. There was no visual language for that genre of music yet – it was only just starting to define itself – and a lot of stuff was very cheaply produced and sounded very naïve. So I thought it would be good for me to design in the same way; to be naïve with a new technology and not be afraid to do things that people might not like aesthetically. That ended up being a good step to discovering that I should do things that I liked to do and not just what people expected from me. Later on when you’re doing business you also have to fulfil people’s expectations but I still see myself as a professional who doesn’t just want to fulfil expectations, and I suppose this was the beginning of that philosophy.
2. Canon NP1330 Photocopier The copy machine is a very important piece of technology in our studio. When I started out there were no computers around so graphic design was really hand-crafted work, you had to make decisions about where to include technology and how that changed the way you designed. What I like about the photocopier is that it’s designed for reproducing things quickly but it also has these additional elements like scaling. When you take this layer of functionality the manufacturer has given it and start to experiment with the limits of the technology, then you arrive at solutions the maker never thought about. In the early days it opened my mind to see that there was an object with specific functionality that I could push and try to figure out what was possible beyond that. The copy machine is still a really important part of how we work. Lots of people think that we do this hand-crafted work because it’s the most visual, or the thing that people particularly like about us, but it’s just another tool. We try to see things as tools that help us to visualise our concepts. It’s no different to a computer or pen. It’s also a useful reminder that technology somehow always offers something new. If you don’t just accept what other people think of it, start to question and experiment with it, you’ll find out that there’s a whole realm of possibilities that you can use as a designer and that ultimately it’s there to help you make things better.
3. Thorsten Brinkmann: Rain McKeul We have this open factory space here in Berlin – there’s no doors and everyone works in one room – but I sit on the far side of the room . When we arrived the walls were white and clean and I always saw my studio as being like a castle, a safe place where I can be who I am and do what I want; that helps me to protect myself in my everyday life. I need this kind of safe place to work. I saw Thorst Brinkmann’s work very early in his career and I instantly fell in love with his way of working. I had the chance to meet and have dinner with him and he was talking about h