That's what Felix and I are doing right now. After he had built himself one last summer it's my turn now. We used his old bending form to get the flex into the six layers of birch and beech plywood which we had glued together beforehand. After cutting the shape it's up to me now to grind and smoothen the edges, varnish and put the design on the board. I'll keep you posted.

Sorry for the lousy quality of the pics, my Mac's at a repair place for two weeks so I'm using crappy online software for my image processing.

By the way, this is the final stage of my Bastei Font so far.

Done! Over! Finito! The semester at KABK and therefore my second half year abroad has come to an end, at least school-wise – cause on Monday were final presentations. Everything was even a bit more hectic than last time as the profs were trying hard to keep the schedule. I myself got a bit panicky one hour prior to my turn as I still had to get some finishing touches done and not everything was working out according to plan. After the short minor freak-out everything went well though – I had lots of time left after all, the presentation was smooth and laid-back and my assessment was also quite positive. I (as well as Cécile) was even offered to finish my studies here at KABK – felt quite honored, especially after hearing that this kinda thing doesn't happen very often, but I'm not sure if I'm gonna take it. It's definitely something worth considering, but first the internship and then we'll see.

Below a picture of my presentation space as well as some close ups of the work that you might already know. Business cards, book wrappings, exhibition model and the final posters.

Continuing with the posters for the Exhibition project. My concept has finally been worked out and accepted by my profs: small scaled portraits of rape victims on the walls and tripping stones in the ground. The latter making visitors fall on and remember the trip to the gallery more vividly for a longer time. Both are connected through the metaphor of 'scarring' – one being emotional scars the other physical ones.

Everything on the posters is gonna change though – title, layout and style. I really liked the idea of 'bruising' or 'scarring' the paper, but my teacher didn't ;)

...with both the font and calligraphy. Unfortunately last week we had our last meeting with the ingenious Frank Blokland. As none of the exchangies was prepared for this – we all thought we still had at least a week – we could only show him our crappy sketches instead of (attempts on) precisely drawn pages. Nonetheless, Cécile and I ended up having a nice chat with him about Microsoft vs. Mac, red wine and his new house. In addition to that he let us in on a little secret and showed us the first stages of a very very cool project he's currently working on that in my opinion will revolutionize the process of creating fonts. Sorry, can't tell you much more at the moment, but keep checking his website Dutch Type Library – this fall you should be able to see what I mean. But that 'thing' showed that this guy is truly a master of his craft – not only has he perfected the use of the broad nip pen and brush, but he's also willing to adjust to changing times... Gotta love that geeky guy.

As for my font, you can see how it's going. I tend to drift off easily and add useless swashes to my letters instead of concentrating on their 'pure' form, making them look a lot like Latin thug tattoos. But I think, this might actually be a good use for the final version – should there ever be one, which I doubt. At least it could be a nice way of presenting the current state of my Bastei font in two weeks time.

Updates from time to time.

Not really a quickie this time as it took me several hours (come to think of it, so did the other ones actually). Now for a book from 2007 that we liked and had bought recently. All my books are back home so I only had one at hand from 2003: Super, Welcome To Graphic Wonderland.

I tried to reflect on the concept – inviting 13 designers from Europe and letting them do whatever the f*** they wanted to – by doing whatever the f*** I wanted to while still keeping some references to the design of the book. Hence the fragmentation and the use of the different papers.

Brandnew Portfolio online now! This time with CV – not that anyone cares. Download on the bottom right or right here.

Work in progress. The general brief is to make a fictional exhibition on the subject 'Private / Public' (to be shown with a little cardboard model) and two posters – one for your own exhibit and one including everyone else's work from the class. I'm basically switching ideas and concept every second day.The ones you're seeing are three days old :) From left to right:

'Scents' – Extracting the body odor from people and making a whole exhibition just with smells and scents. Posters are based solely on color schemes trying to visualize 'scents'. They are sprayed with strong perfume, so you can actually smell them when walking past.

'Scars' – Making an exhibition about scars, ranging from human scars to scars in nature, scarred objects etc. There would be traps set up in the room, making people trip, fall and take a 'souvenir' back home. Posters scarred in the way that their pure white surface is either ripped open, cut into or actually 'scared' (scratched from the back side, very subtle – top right poster, can't really see it, sorry).

'Private / Public' – My concept for the 'group poster'. Poster that can be folded or split in the middle. Can than either be hung in the way on the right, only showing half, forcing the viewer to tear away the 'Public' half. Or – which was the initial idea – can be hung into door frames and folded around the corner so that only the 'Public' part can be seen when walking past. One would then actually have to open the door, i.e. intrude a private space to see the 'Private' half (pics will follow).

Still the same Typography assignment – this week we were supposed to wrap a book that we designed / made ourselves. Unfortunately in my case those books are all back in Germany, except for one. That one is a permanent birthday calender I quickly produced during bookbinding class last year. So how to wrap a birthday calender? In birthday balloons of course! Two different solutions based on the same idea.