From Zürich to Amsterdam with Johannes Breyer

[text] Kevin Pedron, Italy / [images] Johannes Breyer, Holland

Johannes Breyer is a young (and talented) graphic designer that I had the pleasure to meet during the Font-Market held in Zurich, and following the coverage a few friends and I provided to aiapzine I decided to interview him during his recent move from Switzerland to Amsterdam.

Let's start easy. Where are you and what are you up to at the moment, work-wise?
There’s a lot of stuff going on at the moment: I finished a one year long internship in Zürich at the design studio NORM and just moved back to Amsterdam, where I will continue my studies in graphic design at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. Now, after a long and great period of intense working, I am looking forward to experience the non-applied school environment and the complete freedom of the pupil’s innocence again. Besides school, I will try to follow my interest in type design but also want to dig into complete new fields (which I haven’t discovered yet).
Talking to Michel Fries, Font-Market organizer, we came to the conclusion that there is a lack of events where (young) type designers can meet and discuss/share face to face. Is this going to change?
There is definitely a lack of that kind of events, and, for me, especially because Font-Market was a type-lover thing without being too nerdy. I think there is a great power in agile people making type all over europe by themselves, but still we have to connect at some point and make ourselves visible to the, at least, “graphic design public”. Saying: the people who don't DO, but work with type.
How did Font-Market go, for you and in general?
Font-Market was great fun for Fabian Harb and me; we came up with something playful – which is also the way we do type, and thus didn’t get lost in pretentious seriousness. Funnily, more the older generation caught interest in our silkscreened christmas paper – but hey, you always try to broader your audience, right? ;-)
I enjoyed to see such a broad range of fields covered: all projects coming from the reflection about type – but all surprisingly different in outcome and materialization.
Which projects impressed you most?
All together I was most impressed by Anthony and Edd from the Colophon Type Foundry in Brighton. Besides being all-friendly guys, it was great to see how fast their “business” grew the past years, what a nice and diverse range of not-too-contemporary fonts they cover, and how professional they set up everything already at such young age! And I like the fact that I’m a bit taller then them.
I'm a big fan of Better Mjstakes by the way. Do you think your graphic design background influences your way of writing? Should writing be, now more than ever, a required skill in our job?
For me this is a very general question in life, without wanting to sound tacky. But: who writes, has to think about WHAT to write. While writing, you sharp your thoughts and besides must have the courage to
write things down and thus make yourself visible to other people. What’s important for me, also in graphic design, is consciousness. That was the personal aim of Hugo Hoppmann and me when we started Better Mjstakes. Being aware of your attitude towards things and having an explanation at hand for the stuff you do.
Now that online publishing has actually started to grow (I guess we're a couple of years later here in Italy), how important are the process and the material to both independent designers and publishing houses?
First, I think online publishing is great, because everyone has the opportunity to publish his thoughts with no costs. Second, as always when everything is possible, you have to try to hold the quality up and not push the “publish button” too quick.
Back to personal, in your interview for crapisgood.com you told the most enjoyable project you’ve worked on was Nietzsche's letterpress printed poster. Is it still your first pick?
I still love that one a lot, yes, but there's another one, quite different at scale, which I am okay with: it was a proposal for an outdoor advertisement of the new ‘EYE Film Instituut Nederland’ building. The question was: how to pack the nature of moving images into one single image? My aim was to both transform the characteristics of film into a printed space and to create an image that functions as an abstract architectural preview of the not yet finished building.
I used the press video which shows the unveil of the building on a scale model built out of sand, the contours highlighted in best laser show manner. While always letting a certain part of the video run, I froze – or captured – each frame with a digital scanner pressed against the computer monitor until the scanning process was finished. The outcome derives from the way a scanner reads an (normally not moving) image. This way, a new image is created out of many – yet the strong architectural shape is being kept and recognizable. My final design consists of four different sequences of the same length of the movie. My proposal won the design prize “Edits” and was displayed 3×4 meters large in front of the Amsterdam main station for six months.
How much of your inspiration (yeah this word is badly overused) comes from contemporary designers (and social-networks: twitter, tumblr, fffound etc.)? Do you think the common lack of an explanation of the process behind every project posted, generating a huge stream of visual stimulation, is hurting our ability to understand and "digest" other people's work?
Your question already includes my answer, hooray! I totally think that just watching tons of pictures without being interested in the idea behind is a complete waste of time. Of course you need formal and technique-wise inspiration, everyone does, but here we’re talking about people who already upload a useless “work-in-progress” screenshot every five minutes to their facebook page while “working” on a project.
I'm not asking which is your favourite typeface, but which is the last you used in a project?
Right now I am using my own “JB BINGO” a lot. It’s an interpretation of a squared typeface I came across browsing through old specimen books, and developed further with the help of NORM. Having its roots somewhere in the dust fields of american woodtype, and bold and heavy as always, Bingo comes up with another detail unusual to the ordinary college-style: a simple squared outside is combined with a polygon-inside shape, that still appears rounded at small size. I like to use my own typefaces for projects – it’s like baking a cake with making even the dough for it yourself.

Thank you very much Johannes and good luck in Amsterdam!