#literally NOBODY is joan campaigning who is doing this

[t4tails]

dont fuck with ash williams fans apparently we can get our asses kicked by joan of arc nerds

[nostalgic-pancakes]

F is for friends who do stuff together - the awake at 2 AM remix

Joan needs a swear jar, Talyn's a lightbulb, Valerie is tired and valid, and Thomas+Sides are very confused)

Summary- Thomas has had his sides around for... a long time. That's for sure. And he knows that nobody else can see them (except maybe Lilly, but she has sides too, so).

Pairings- Pintroverts, Thomas and friends, Thomas and Sides

Read on AO3

Word count- 2666

Warnings- It has character!everyone, and NOT their real life counterparts. Please remember this.

Other notes- AU where instead of Vine, c!Thomas left chemical engineering for signing with a really dope theatre company with his friends. He still meets Nico at the mall, but Nico's a new writer for the company! All the sides are friends too! Enjoy!

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Look, the first time was an accident, okay? Joan was tired and a bit incoherent and what was Thomas supposed to do?!! Leave them be? No! So Joan ended up staying the night.

Except, the next morning was when everyone had entered the courtroom together and they'd gotten WAY too dramatic over whether to lie to them about a text they'd made like… two days ago and that Thomas had only seen after combing through a barrage of memes and that Joan probably wouldn't remember, come to think about it. But that was hindsight and after the utter nightmare that was a whole day (A whole day!!) with Aunt Patty the day before, Virgil and Patton were absolutely freaking out, probably giving Deceit (Who, in hindsight, Thomas knows as Janus) a little extra leeway into the conversation that day.

Either way, Joan had stayed the night in order to recover from the utter sleep-deprivation that they'd been going through, and Thomas had forgotten about the fact that Joan was even there for most of the morning, only seeing them after the entire courtroom spectacle (and a suspiciously dire warning from Virgil) at breakfast, and them leaving to see Talyn a little after (with plenty of hugs involved, duh).

Then Thomas told Joan the truth over the call, and Joan had said The Line (as Roman, Virgil and Janus call it with an oddly cryptid-like voice) and Thomas felt himself go frigid.

Since when did Joan know that Thomas talked to his sides?! Had they learned their names? Figured out that Thomas might just have a few extra screws loose than they might have initially thought?

"Maybe they even hate us now because we got so crazed over one little text and--”

“Virgil. Not helping!” Thomas yelps, and Virgil catches himself in his spiel of worst case scenarios, looking a bit sheepish. Patton and Thomas smile at him reassuringly (he hopes) and Logan clears his throat, causing everyone to turn to him.

“Well, Joan seems to be aware enough of the fact that you speak to us, but mostly considers it as you, as they had said, ‘talking to yourself’, and besides, you didn’t name-drop us too many times, anyways. And while it’s not really...ideal, that Joan thinks you talk to yourself for this long-”

“You can say that again, Stephen Hawk-Nerd”, murmured Roman. Logan winces, and Thomas kind of wants to hug him, so he does.

“Yes, Roman, and as bad as that nickname is, note that this is not, in fact a worst-case scenario. This can be put down to the fact that Thomas has some strange personality quirks-”

“Did you just do some wordplay there, kiddo?” Patton beams at the implication, while Logan, currently being shared by Thomas and Virgil, just groans and descends further into the contact.

“No, I did not, Patton, but what I am saying, is that this is not too bad. We can talk about it as a general personality quirk. This is fine.” Logan finishes, and becomes a heap in the total hug-pile of Thomas and Virgil, flopping over. Huh, he (as usual) has a point. Maybe this can work.

The second time was a pretty near miss, but once again, it was unexpected! He and the sides were just watching Mulan together as usual! They were piled up together, blankets in hand, and yeah, it might look weird to anyone who can’t see the sides, he guesses, with the blankets stretched out in places that have nothing to stretch onto, but once again, he wasn't expecting someone to come over! But anyways- whatever happens, happens. He's trying to be better about it.

It really doesn't stop Janus from pulling out all the stops (teaming up with Virgil, even!) when it comes to having to come up with an alibi to Terrence over why the blankets are arranged so strangely, even though there is literally nothing keeping it afloat. In the end, it's not the most believable lie, but Terrence is busy with Valerie just after, so he probably doesn't really think about it too hard. Besides, Thomas has always been a pretty quirky guy! ("Which could be an insul--" "Jack and Sullen, we love you very very much, but please, for the love of all things Disney, please breathe and take out your fidget cube..") So hey, what was a new quirk when added to everything else?

Meanwhile, Terrence is trying to figure out what the fuck he just saw, because he's pretty sure that there were more than one Thomas there, and Thomas only has two other brothers. Also none of them dress like twenties mobsters or are semi-transparent.

Nico was having a good day. In fact, he still is!

He and his (amazing) boyfriend were sitting on the couch- though more draped on top of each other than anything while binge watching ELITE and Tiny Pretty Things, while also being pleasantly high (as opposed to stoned).

Things only entered strange territory when during one of the flashback murder-y scenes in Tiny pretty Things, a strange man who looked like an even more chaotic Thomas with some grey hair on him entered the room from seemingly nowhere, and proceeded to occupy the sparse space on Thomas’s lap with his head, essntially just napping on his boyfriend’s lap while also being kind of see-through (???!!!???AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH). Thomas noticed, waved a small wave and started playing with this weird guy’s hair.

Nico is now a little high from the bong that he and Thomas had shared, but not enough to hallucinate, especially since, when the high was pretty much gone, the guy was STILL THERE. MIERDA. At this point, he’s just going to call it ghosts. Thomas doesn’t seem to mind too much anyways, so they must not be harmful. Nico decides to table this for another day and go back to binge watching crazy maniacs with his very soft and warm boyfriend, and let the remainder of the high coast along.

"We have to talk about the Thomas thing." Is the first thing Joan says without any bullshit, as soon as everyone except Thomas himself, Gavin (because it's two AM) and Quil are packed together in Thomas's living room, where he just binged Parks and Rec with everyone. They've all finally managed to shove Thomas and Quil back to their respective areas of sleep after 42 hours without said sleep, and nobody was allowed to talk loud enough for them to wake up.

"The… Thomas thing?" Asks Valerie. Oh that sweet summer child. Joan once again quietly calls everyone's attention by asking Talyn to shake their hair around like a neon-coloured alarm bell. This was especially effective in the otherwise dark kitchen where they were trying out glow in the dark hair dye.

"Well, as of lately, we've been seeing a lot, and I mean a lot of really weird shit coming from Thomas. Everyone, recount your experiences." Joan says in the most serious voice they've got. "I'll go first."

They wave their hands like Matt Mercer, as if they were setting up a dope DND campaign. Quietly, of course.

"Well, about a month ago now, I was cleaning here, at Thomas's, because I was sleep-deprived and would have crashed and died if I'd tried to go back to mine and Talyn's. So most of the night goes normally, as one would expect, but when I wake up in the morning…" Joan readjusts their beanie. "I hear Thomas in the living room, talking to people called Logan, Roman, someone called Pat, Virgil and 'deceit'. And this debate becomes an ordeal, alright? He re-enacts a whole entire ace-attorney style courtroom scene with these imaginary people? I called him out on it over the phone when he apologized for some random thing- I don't remember, and he kind of just… admitted that he talks to himself? And moved on.

Everyone absorbs this new information. Camden keeps braiding Talyn's hair.

"But that's not too big of a deal, right Joan?" Whispers Camden, tying up the elaborate mini fishtail plait in Talyn's hair. "I mean, thanks Thomas we're talking about. He could have been rehearsing or something- isn't he JD in the next production of Heathers?"

Terrence speaks up next. "Yes, this would have been all well and good, had the Blanket Incident ™ not occured."

Valerie shakes her head. Why are her friends like this? Oh wait. They’re all theatre nerds, queer and D&D players.

"In the blanket incident ™, I was walking past Thomas's room, as one does. HOWEVER, while he was watching Mulan, I noticed something wrong with his blanket pile!"

"What, that they don't have any Vetal Miking references on them? Because that's the true tragedy here."

"Nope, sorry Tal, the weirdness here was not about Vetal Miking references, but the fact that parts of the blanket were freaking floating, in thin air! I have discreet pictures!"

"What the fuck, Terrence." whispered everyone in a strange, haunting unison that could only be possible at two AM as they saw the very strange pictures.

"And that's not it!" Pipes up Talyn, who is now realising that they are very close to becoming too loud for 2 AM kitchen chats, and makes an effort to quiet down.

"At breakfast today, Thomas's waffles were making themselves- Thomas can't cook, y'all. And he can't even use is fucking waffle iron. And he was on the other side of the room! Talking to Quil!" After Quil left, he told the waffle creator to chill out because the stack was getting too tall!"

"Is this about Thomas's ghosts, guys?" Asks Nico, the new cute boyfriend and new theatre company writer as he plops down in Quil's usual spot. Nico's nice- everyone likes Nico except maybe Nico, to which, well, mood. ALSO- ghosts?!!

"Nico what the fuck do you mean by ghosts, you serial killer in training?"

"One, just because I have to write a serial killer in this new script and I'm enjoying it, it doesn't mean I'm gonna be a serial killer, you tonte. Two: yeah, the ghosts that follow him around and look just like him? They seem nice enough." At everyone's super unspoken request to elaborate, for fuck's sake, he takes the hint and does.

“Oh! So the first time I saw them, I was at the mall. You know, where Thomas and I met?” everyone nods, and Talyn readjusts their braces.

“So there was this guy in a hoodie- Virgil, as you said, and the Disney prince. Roman, I think. And they were just kind of… there? Roman was holding Virgil’s shoulder affectionately, and that’s about it. They were only really visible after about three or four hours of us talking, though.” Some of the people hum.

“Then, we were watching a movie and these two guys who also look a lot like Thomas just kind of lounged? On the couch? They were pretty faint, like if their brightness was decreased to about thirty percent in Photoshop.”

“Hey, same!” says Terrence.

“Yeah, so those guys- the one in the green t-shirt that has the legs on the bus meme- so weird- kind of just stretches onto Thomas’s lap and stays there, while the twenties mobster just… curls up to his side? And thomas is probably like, used to this because he kind of just lets it be and curls the meme shirt-”

“I think it’s Remus.”

“-Remus’s hair absentmindedly and moves on.”

“Fuck.” Whispered Joan very softly, but with great feeling.

“So what do we do about it?” asks Camden. There, finally, someone asks the real questions.

“Well,” puts forward Talyn. “They’re not harming him, right? And he’s had them around for a long enough time, right? So what’s the harm? Thomas is just haunted and will probably be on Buzzfeed Unsolved: Supernatural at some point when he dies but hey, if he’s cool with it, we are too.”

Everyone seems to agree with that, and they’re in comfortable silence, until Valerie asks everyone to go the fuck to sleep, we’re still doing the Heather’s costume rehersals and Death Week starts in two days. With groans and cracked joints from Talyn, everyone hobbles off to their respective rooms in the duplex.

Meanwhile, a certain white-streaked side and his hoodied companion are listening through the wall, far away from what anyone can see, and they both visibly sigh in relief. That didn’t go too badly. The question remains: what do we do now?

“They KNOW????” exclaims Thomas, the next day in the (thankfully empty) breakroom, in between rehearsals- Candy Store is being run through and that means that everyone else is outside.

“Yes, Thomas, they know. Or they somewhat know, I suppose.”

“Yeah, because they think we’re-Thomas is being HAUNTED!!’

“Are you not haunted, then?” comes a voice, and Thomas turns around, forgetting to let the sides dissipate in his surprise. It’s Nico, with Talyn and Valerie close behind, who are clearly taking in the six other guys in the breakroom. Well, fuck. The cat’s out of the bag for good, he guesses.

“Could you get everyone else during lunch break? I’ll explain then.” Talyn nods and leaves with a smile, telling him that they’re not mad at him, while Nico asks, voice farther away “So are you haunted or not?”.

“So they’re… aspects of your personality that you’ve been able to manifest since you were a kid?” Camden asks, a bit disbelieving, even as Logan, Roman, Patton and Janus drape themselves over Thomas on one of the beanbags in the breakroom, filled with other nerdy gay young adults. Logan pushes up his glasses, ready to go on another tangent. Go wild, you funky little dude.

“Well yes, that’s exactly what we're saying. I myself am the embodiment of Logic- every fact that Thomas has ever learned, and his, and these are his words, not mine, ‘the only braincell’. He makes the air quotes to go with the expression, but is also smiling fondly.

“Classic Thomas.”

“Yes, Valerie, I am inclined to agree. However, this is not specific to Thomas. Other people can, in fact, do what Thomas is. Lilly Singh is one of them- the reason that she and Thomas are even friends is because in high school Thomas caught her talking to one of her sides in the art room.”

“So wait-- we can summon sides too?!” asks Nico, and he and Camden look genuinely excited, but Thomas knows the answer to that question.

“Unfortunately no, not really. You have to have an extremely active imagination, and also be ‘innocent’, as society would put it. I’d say näive.”

“For example, I couldn’t make any more sides after i was fourteen, because I watched the news by then.” pipes in Thomas. Joan seems to process this first, nodding and grinning sardonically. “Ah yes, the news. Wrecking childhoods since forever.” everyone nods in gay syncing, because gay minds think at the same time.

Valerie suddenly speaks up; “So how many sides do you have, Thomas?”

Thomas perks up, because his sides are possibly his favourite metaphysical beings (as narcissistic as that might sound) “I have six! My logic, morality, both creativities- Kids and Family and PG13-and-up, anxiety and deceit! I have two creativities because of catholic guilt and my mind’s inherent need to cause chaos, I guess.”

“Valid” replied Valerie.

The rest of break passed by pretty smoothly, with questions being passed back-and-forth about what the sides truly were, considering they clearly were not just Thomas, and Virgil even felt okay enough to come in later! So that was good. Though he kind of wishes Remus had made fewer Heathers jokes- Camden was starting to look squeamish, even as Nico frantically took notes of gorey facts to use in his script.

Honestly, Thomas thought to himself. What was I scared of?

Irrational things. And rejection, replies Virgil in his head. He laughs and pulls him in for a hug, and tries as he might to deny it, Virgil is looking pretty chuffed.

[raystart]

Erik Spiekermann: No Free Pitches

Erik Spiekermann insists he’s retired, that his whirlwind schedule and backlog of projects is all just a hobby. One day he’s in his hometown of Berlin, where he’s currently overseeing his experimental letterpress workshop, galerie p98a.The next he’s off to San Francisco, where Edenspiekermann, the digital branding and product company he founded, has an office. Then it’s on to Los Angeles for a presentation at the Art Center of Los Angeles, before flying across the country to speak at the Type Directors Club in New York City. He spends the next day in Manhattan – a Saturday – taking meetings beginning at 9:30 a.m. to plan future endeavors, rather than kicking back.

Spiekermann photographed in his studio in Berlin.

This is not a man who lazes away his days, especially when you consider that Spiekermann regularly takes his bike out for 20-, 30-, 40-mile spins. “Ever since I’ve had four stents put in my heart, I’m good as new,” he says. Given his body of work and superhuman level of accomplishment, however, Spiekermann could certainly justify never working another day in his life. The type designer, information architect, and entrepreneur has created branding for Audi, Bosch, VW and German Railways, as well as done a way-finding redesign for Düsseldorf Airport and a makeover of The Economist. Along with Edenspiekermann, he has founded two other businesses, MetaDesign and FontShop. We caught up with Spiekermann in New York City to reflect on his storied career, understand how he parlayed his creative talent into a number of thriving companies, and learn why he needs to live to 100 to be able to finish half of what he has on his plate in the coming years.

You arrived for and were ready to do this interview 10 minutes early. Have you always been this prompt?

I’ve learned this over time. I don’t know why, because I’m creative, I guess, I was always five minutes late to everything. When I was at MetaDesign in the ’90s, there were regular meetings with a dozen people and everybody had to wait for me because I’m the boss. Then one time, I worked out the math that if I’m five minutes late and there are 12 people sitting there, that’s 60 minutes. And if every one of those people charges $100/hour for our client work, then I’m wasting $100 by having people wait for me for five minutes. I know it doesn’t quite work that way, but it does add up over time. From that day on, I realized I could be five minutes early.

You strike me as someone who operates with maximum efficiency.

No, no, no. I am a weird mix. I am incredibly precise and very chaotic when it comes to my own life. I have no plan. I just wing it. But I am terribly fastidious when it comes to the small stuff. When I do typography, it’s 150 percent effort. With meetings like this, I’m always on time. And everybody who is not drives me crazy, because it’s rude and inefficient. Being on time is a sign of civility between two people. In my work, I am incredibly teutonic and fussy, and I’m trying to be a little more relaxed. Because I’m terrible that way. My wife complains about the fact that I’m like this. Galerie p98a was supposed to be a hobby, not a business. But it turned into – I now have 20 proof presses. Who needs more proof presses than any museum probably? It is not because I want to die with the most proof presses – I probably will – it just happened.

How do you work?

Work is gas. Work will fill any given volume. If you give me two hours, I will take two hours. If you give me 10 minutes, I will take 10 minutes. So if you give somebody two weeks to do a project, he’s going to start on day 12 and it will take him two days, but the two weeks will be filled because work expands like gas. Straightforward physics. That’s why I don’t believe in time sheets, because you always happen to have eight hours at the end of the day. You make up stuff. I felt that if our business model means that people have to work overtime or weekends, the business model sucks. So everybody is out by 7 p.m.–we literally close the doors at 7 p.m. –because if you have to work overtime, then your model sucks. And if the clients require you to do weekends, then the clients aren’t right. They wouldn’t do it themselves.

Like if you tell someone they can go home once they’re done with their work for the day, and not necessarily a specific time like 6 p.m., they tend to get their work done earlier than 6 p.m.

I know a lot of advertising agencies that thrive on overtime because they have a dozen interns who work for free and they spend their weekends doing free pitches. We don’t do free pitches because we don’t have any free time. Our time is valuable, and I’m not giving away ideas to some prospective client. That’s giving away the most valuable resource you have.

 So you contract your pitches as part of the project fee?

Clients come in and they discuss working with you, so of course you have to show them something. But a lot of clients, they want us to make some sketches to show what it could look like. That’s already the work we do. That’s the meal. We’ll discuss the menu with clients but once they sit down and eat the first bite, it’s chargeable. I’m not giving away any creative work for free. Once we know what the project is, we’ll tell you how much it’s going to cost. But we won’t deliver any ideas for free. We deliver a proposal that describes the work and the timing.

“Maybe I’ll do a big international campaign to get rid of cardboard or plastic cups. This really pisses me off.”

At 70 years old, you say you’re retired, and yet you remain quite active in your work.

Retired means that nobody pays me. That’s what retired means.

You’re doing the same work, just with no pay?

I do different work, things like designing watch faces, stamps, or coins. Making a character work at four point size, and not at 40-point is incredibly inspiring. You don’t do these for the money, but it’s great fun.

What first led you to parlay your creativity into a business?

It was necessity. I went to university in Berlin, but my first wife and I had a child very early on, at 21, while I was going to university. So I had to work, and I didn’t ever graduate. Paying for the family meant I was doing all sorts of things. I could design stuff and print stuff for people while doing artwork as well. That’s how I sold myself. I drifted into the freelance life and then we went to London.

What motivated you to go there?

The motivation was mostly negative. My wife at the time, Joan, was English, and we rented a really nice house when my son was born in Berlin. And then the owner of the house pushed us out after two years. We were so devastated that we said we might as well go to England, where Joan comes from and where I’d previously been in the ’60s. We went to London in 1973. I worked nights doing typography for a company called Filmcomposition, until I put together a résumé in 1977 and sent it to bunch of agencies offering me work. I got a call from Wally Olins at Wolff Olins who said they had all these German clients, and I went over to Wolff Olins and took care of all of them, like VW and Audi, on freelance terms. At the time in Germany, there weren’t any large corporate design studios. There were only mom-and-pop shops, so all the big brands went to England or to America. I became the Germans’ connection to Wolff Olins on the production side. I ended up starting MetaDesign in 1979 while I was still at Wolff Olins and returned to Berlin in 1981.

How did you decide to start another one of your businesses, FontShop, in 1989?

Because I was in the type scene I first  visited Adobe’s offices in California in ’87 or ’88, and I brought back all of these fonts from Adobe on computer disks because we didn’t have them in Europe yet. Pretty soon, more people in Europe were asking me for fonts, so I thought that there was a marketplace here. I persuaded people like Adobe to give me fonts to sell on consignment and suddenly I had about 800 disks with 800 fonts in the cellar underneath our studio in Berlin. It was the invention of the mail order font business – this was before downloading and the Internet. We had a phone line and we put ads in the local graphic design magazines in Berlin, and the next day the phones rang and there was cash suddenly. It was me and my, by that time, ex-wife, in the MetaDesign Studio, which was only six or seven people. We had one desk that was called the FontShop desk. It was a telephone and literally a chair. It was a mom-and-pop shop that grew, and after three years, we had 40 people working at FontShop.

What was the most valuable lesson you took back to Berlin from your time in London?

I learned that a brand isn’t a logo. There has to be implementation. You can design anything, but if the rubber doesn’t hit the road, you’ll be remembered as a great strategist but the client won’t call you again. You have to have a strategy, and you also have to be able to visualize it – one doesn’t go without the other. So I wasn’t a graphic designer anymore. I was a corporate designer, which is quite different.

It means you can charge more?

Charge more, yeah, but now you think in systems. You know that a logo needs to have typeface with it, it needs to have a color system and needs to fit into the environment. It also needs to physically work. We talk in pixels but still my concern is always: What does it look like when it arrives in people’s hands? What does it look like in my mother’s hands? Everybody’s mother is the average consumer. My mother is dead, but she always gave me my best feedback. Mothers are good because they kind of know us personally, but they don’t professionally. So they are well-meaning observers. And because they’re our mothers, we listen to them.

What do you feel is the biggest challenge for a typographer in 2017?

There is more copycatting than there has been. I can see two approaches. One is that you have a creative urge to design a typeface because you want to. You have an idea, and you don’t care whether it’s been done before. You want to express yourself in the writing system, so you design a typeface. If you’re very lucky, it’s unusual, it works, and it goes somewhere. These days, that happens now and again. Then the other school is that you have maybe a thousand foundries, and everybody has their version of the classics – Times, Helvetica, Futura, whatever – that they’ve done by going a little on either side of the classical direction. So that’s a thousand foundries, times 20, and now we have a few hundred thousand fonts. I’ve always designed typefaces for specific solutions. In other words, a problem. Everything has always been done for a specific purpose. As a designer, you work for somebody else. That’s not negative. I work for a client, and I solve their problems. I bring my artistic vision to it, my creativity, whatever you want to call it. But essentially, I’m being paid to blow somebody else’s trumpet.

When you look at what other people are making these days, who is inspiring to you?

I love some of the stuff that my ex-colleagues and friends are doing. One of my favorites is Commercial Type’s Christian Schwartz. In New York, I like Steven Heller, who writes a book a day, kind of. And Paula Scher and Louise Fili. Their work is so different from my work, and I thrive on that. Louise, who does mostly packaging and restaurants: I love that stuff, mainly because I can’t do it. And Paula’s rigorous approach to typography. I love that. And there’s always a bit of envy there, because I don’t have those clients. But more than envy, there’s appreciation. All these people have attitude. And I like people with attitude – that is probably the common denominator here.

As an eminence in the world of design and typography, does your reputation make it harder or easier to create?

It’s a bit of both. I mean, there’s a lot of disadvantages to being old. I hate being old.

I wouldn’t say you’re old.

Well, I’m 70, which is fucking old. The advantage of being older is that you have no fear. You go into a new project and think, Look, I’ve done something like this before. I’ve cracked this one. We redesigned the visual identity for the Berlin Transport Authority after the Berlin Wall came down – chaos. We redesigned the Düsseldorf airport signage within four weeks after a fire. Every time you get a project, you think, “My god, how do I start?” The start is the most important part, and that’s where confidence comes in. When you’re older you have the confidence. And how do you start? You start by looking at the project and taking it apart, like boys and their toys. Then you put the parts back together. Sometimes you have a part left over, or you find parts that are redundant, or parts that need redoing. And then it will be new. The final thing about being older is that I won’t take shit from clients. Like I said, no free pitches.

Back to the retirement question: Are you ever going to retire?

Of course not. I need to live to be a hundred years old to do half of my plans. Some of them go 50 years  back. Like I want do a monograph on Louis Oppenheim, a German type designer, obviously Jewish, who died in ’35, luckily, before the Nazis could get to him. I’ve always liked his work. He’s up there with the greats and nobody knows it. He became a local hero, not an international hero. So that’s been something that I’ve wanted to do forever. I’m also printing books in letterpress, but using Macintosh technology, so using polymer plates rather than starting with Monotype or hand-set lead type. These things, merging digital and analog, have been on my mind for a long time. I know that I will never, ever sit by my fireside and just read books, even though I’m designing a lot of books at the moment, just regular fiction, because I’ve always been annoyed by the fact that so many books are badly designed. I’m not talking about the covers but the internals. There’s no excuse why big publishers can’t have a decent template. I’m reading more fiction because I’m designing a book every other week. I’m not getting paid for it, because the authors are friends of mine. I’ve noticed that I’m pretty good at InDesign. I get my style sheets done, and I design a book in an afternoon that might take other people a week.

“I need to live to be a hundred years old to do half of my plans.”

What about any passion projects outside the traditional realm of design?

Maybe I’ll do some big international campaign to get rid of cardboard or plastic cups, which really concerns me. This really pisses me off.

Some claim that globalization and the Internet are wiping out the pluralism and variety in design and typography through the standardization of styles. How do you see this?

Globalization makes things the same, and the same can mean bland, but the same can also mean easy access. It means that I can go anywhere in the world and I can move around because certain things are standardized, like a street curb, which I appreciate. But globalization in a cultural way is bad because it leads to homogeneity. While I regret globalization to a certain extent, I sometimes see it bringing out the best in people. In Berlin, we’ve got more than 150,000 Turks who are second or third generation. They’re bringing their culture to Berlin. And people realize: Wait a minute. There is something else.

You continuously travel around the world, from Berlin to London, San Francisco, New York, and beyond. How has crossing different cultural borders and barriers impacted you?

It’s just simply going to other countries and seeing how people do things differently, whether you like it or not. I was always very critical of how the Brits couldn’t do implementation. And I’m a little underwhelmed with the American way of building – constructing those wooden sheds that will fold over with the next hurricane – because I’m a brick-building, concrete-building German. We tend to always build bunkers. Maybe because we started so many wars? But even if somebody doesn’t do something better than you, you learn about why other people do things differently. The diversity is incredibly confusing, but it’s incredibly enriching.

As an avid cyclist, do you draw any connection between cycling and creativity?

Oh yeah. A day without being on a bicycle is always a lost day for me. Obviously, there is the adrenaline and getting somewhere, but there is also vision. On a bike, I’m always at the height of an SUV, and I see so much more. I’m a sponge, and I read every sign, every license plate. A bicycle gives me physical and mental freedom. There’s nothing better than going around an unknown city and finding new stuff.