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The start is making a link I have come across on YouTube by accident this morning. I have not done any visuals for it, just the sound design. Here’s an old Fork Unstable Media piece from 2001, heavily influenced by depart (no embedding allowed). Also a good reason to checkout what Oel and Zanshin from depart are all about these days :-)

Our budget for the booth was very limited. We couldn’t afford to buy or build any extra furniture/interior/construction, so we’ve rented a ready-made stand from the Messe Frankfurt:

Since a lot of other smaller exhibitors also use those kind of stands, our challenge was to create something distinctive and memorable with what we’ve had.

An obvious and easy option would have been to just cover the walls with posters. But we thought that a lot of other companies would go for this solution, and even covered with good-looking posters, the whole construction with its white walls would have looked ready-made. This is how the stands of our neighbors looked like:

So instead of hanging posters, we’ve decided to colour the walls. Because everything was rented we couldn’t paint the wall-elements, but we were allowed to laminate them. We made a 3d-sketch of the booth in Sketch-Up and tried different combinations of black/white/yellow (the FAW colours), included the 15° angle (which is an integral part of the corporate design) and added the logos.

We also rented two cabinets (for the iMacs on which the software was presented). The bottom part was of opaque material, the upper part was made of glass. So we’ve covered everything in black, except the top of the cabinet and a die-cut logo on the front, and placed an fluorescent tube in the glass cabinet.

The result was a illuminating effect - the logo was glowing and it made a very nice ambient lighting.

More photos on flickr.

In the end we were extremely happy with our booth. It turned out exactly as we’ve planned it and it looked even better than we’ve imagined. It was a fun project and we hope to have a chance to work on something similar again soon.

During the past months, we have been involved in the creation and development of a new audio software company called Future Audio Workshop. We are mainly responsible for all visual design parts. Until today, we worked on the visual identity of the company and its first product, a software synthesizer called “Circle” including logos, a brochure, business cards and a lot of merchandising material such as stickers, t-shirts, shopping bags or badges. We also designed the interface of Circle, just launched an advance website and are very excited to see our trade show booth design come alive tomorrow. Within the next months, we’re going to focus on the packaging for Circle, some advertising as well as some fine-tuning of the interface. We’ll keep you posted.

This week, Circle is going to be presented at the MusikMesse in Frankfurt and we’ll be there on March 12th and 13th. So if you’re around, please come by our booth and say hello!

We’d like to show you some bits and pieces here, and we’re also going to keep you posted about our MusikMesse adventures on the FAW Weblog.

Here is Circle’s main interface (go here for more of them and for some screencasts):

This is how the website looks like:

Some of the merchandising (you can win a FAW Fan Kit if you’re one of the first 100 subscribers of the FAW newsletter!):

And some 3d renderings of the booth design:

So for anybody who’s interested, here’s a little overview about what we’ve been working on in the last couple of months.

Our dear friends Tocotronic released a great album last year. Together with the band, we’ve been working on almost the whole graphical output surrounding this release. We’ve designed several CD/LP packagings, posters, advertising, the website (still in progress) and much, much more. Here’s a glimpse:

We also did the cover artwork for the debut album of Herrenmagazin, a young band from Hamburg. Their album is coming out in April and there’s a series of three limited 7″ singles preceding the longplayer. This is what it looks like:

For all your chocolate lovers: you can now order your daily dose at the Ritter Sport Online Shop which we developed together with Fork Unstable Media. While working on it, we tested almost all flavours. We recommend: Knusperkeks, Joghurt, Ganze Mandel, Weiße Voll-Nuss, Erdbeer-Joghurt, Marzipan, Voll Erdnuss, Voll-Nuss, Pfefferminz… actually most of them are quite tasty.

Comissioned by Jung von Matt/next, we did some conceptual and design work for Spiegel Wissen, a new kind of online encyclopedia by German news magazine Der Spiegel. At present, most of our work isn’t implemented though.

An ongoing project of ours is the maintenance and further development of the NIVEA Styleguide BRAND eSSENTIALS. Check out the new Logo Finder.

For our long-time client Native Instruments, we designed software interfaces for new versions of Guitar Rig and Kontakt last year. Currently we are working on two other Native Instruments products, to be released later this year.

Another music software company that keeps us busy is Future Audio Workshop from the Republic of Ireland. They are debuting with their first product at this year’s MusikMesse in Frankfurt. It’s a software synthesizer called “Circle” and we are not only responsible for the interface design, but also the visual identity of the company and product including packaging, website, advertising and the booth at the trade show. More about that in a few days.

Anyway, Miss Zittel’s most interesting works for our category are the so-called A-Z Escape Vehicles (1997) and the A-Z Wagon Stations (2003), that she creates and sells based on the personal taste and getaway phantasies of the buyer and that are functioning as little mobile retreats/refuges. Whenever you want to escape enter the object and close the hatch. It is just the opposite of what people normally do to get away from it all: travel to exotic far away places. Retreat to your innermost!