Bene Office Furniture

A visit to Hubert Schillhuber

Profile:
Hubert Schillhuber was born in Enns, Upper Austria, in 1958. After studying philosophy in Graz and extensive travels abroad, he was a TV designer for ORF in Vienna. In 1990 he went to Hamburg to set up the Pay TV station "Premiere". Together with London graphic designer Neville Brody, he developed the corporate design for "Premiere"; its clear, no-frills use of forms was considered revolutionary.
As the logical consequence of this success, Schillhuber founded the agency DMC Design for Media and Communication in 1992, a Vienna-based design company with a second branch in Hamburg. The corporate design for the ORF was also developed and implemented in collaboration with Neville Brody. In the 90s DMC, which also redesigned the television stations RTL2, VIVA, the women's channel "TM3", the "Weather Channel" and shopping station "HOT" based on the maxim "don't decorate - express", was regarded as the biggest company for electronic design in the German-speaking world. 1996 saw the founding of the subsidiary "01" as an independent EDP enterprise with a comprehensive range of services in the multimedia sector.

Mr Schillhuber, are you a media designer?
I've never seen myself as a designer, more as an all-round creative talent with a number of different gifts. But if I have a profession, then it's that of philosopher. I studied philosophy because it interested me and I didn't want to tie myself down. The fact that analytical thinking is something I have an affinity with has proved a good qualification for my current activities.

So how does a philosopher end up in the mass medium of television?
Quite by chance, because I fancied having a nose around at ORF (Austrian Broadcasting Company). It was a stroke of luck to come from university into this hyper-realistic medium of television. I never actually had any concrete intentions. Except to do things I enjoy.
In the 80s I worked for ORF in the promotion department, "learning by doing", if you like. I had the chance to do permanent design and was constantly in contact with all the various departments. The product could be seen by a mass audience on their screens every evening. This intense exploration of the medium was an excellent training. And it triggered a flash in me, it made me hungry for this medium.
The next jump in the learning curve was setting up the Art Direction and Promotion department for "Premiere" in Hamburg. At the time, Pay TV was something totally exotic, not even I knew what it is. Initially, "Premiere" only existed as a project. Besides promotion, my main area of responsibility was to develop the corporate design for the enterprise. I hired Neville Brody to do that. Getting to know him gave me a deeper understanding of design.

Did you know Neville Brody as the typographer and art director of exciting magazines from London, the Mecca of graphic design?
I only knew Brody the way you would as a design-orientated person. At the time there was a special issue of "Spiegel" magazine that caught my attention - Brody was the only one who was allowed to "touch" Spiegel.
When I was faced with the task of creating a design for a new enterprise, I considered myself at most an autodidact. What are you going to do now, I thought. What I knew from television was unsatisfactory because it was only powered by the technology. Anything the machines could come up with was done. No quality was offered.
So I thought to myself, look for a designer who in your eyes is a genuinely good graphic designer, who is miles ahead in aesthetic terms, and let's give it a go. During our first phone call, Neville said quite by chance that I ought to go to London - and we immediately found we had the same way of thinking: both of us are more concept-orientated. Initially, we are interested in the theoretical foundations of a task. A good product can only arise from a good conception.

The result of the collaboration between Brody & Schillhuber for "Premiere" broke with every known convention of television design up until that point and was celebrated by the press as a "quantum leap in TV aesthetics": large, striking logos, purist two-dimensionality, clear colour navigation systems. Did this design result from a kind of transfer strategy from the computer world, from you interpreting the TV screen as a monitor?
That definitely comes from the collaboration with Neville. I was fascinated by his fantastic typography. I thought about doing a kind of user interface for "Premiere" that could serve to guide the viewers through the programme, as it were. So we developed a very clear navigation system, purely typographical and not in 3D - just because the machines can now do that is not always reason enough to use it.
Even then Neville realised how great the significance of computers would be in the years to come. There was already an indication of what would happen with the New Media. Naturally, we wanted to anticipate that.
Then, for ARD, we made a very conscious decision to go for a contrast. We decided on computer aesthetics for this very serious channel, whose image is essentially based on conveying information. In the years that followed, these aesthetics were to become common property.
To begin with, there were problems getting the customers to accept it, until positive feedback from the audience very quickly followed. Although the public stations don't pay as well as the private ones, you can work with them more experimentally, because they are less commercially orientated.

How did your agency manage to ensure that the CDs of the numerous TV stations and formats that you conceived and designed would be distinguishable from one another?
It was quite simple: different enterprises, target-group orientations and contents also have to be given different stories. I can't get caught up in my own net because I don't have my own trademark. But the various pieces of work do share a common denominator.

Is that to be found in the philosophical-analytical approach, even when dealing with a mass audience?
I don't think that's a contradiction at all. I'm interested in people's reactions. It interests me to create things that have a meaning. The essential thing about any presentation is to tell a story. This story must have something to do with the enterprise in question and reflect it correctly. That requires research - what are the corporate objectives, the next course to be pursued, what is the market or the competition like. Then it's a question of finding an identity for an enterprise. The crucial thing is how this message or story can be transported uniformly via all the media and channels available.
It's a question of extracting an essence, also for the product to be communicated. That's why I look for generalist co-workers, who ideally should not be experts in just one sector. But they should have an anchor, perhaps as a graphic designer or writer. I value people that send out stereo signals. In this technically very complex world, networked thinking is important. It's no good expecting specialised freaks to come up with the right answers. We form teams, Internet people with advertising people, designers with copywriters, in order to cover the entire communications spectrum as completely as possible. To complete the circle: my training was good for that.

And I suppose a comprehensive conception of design is also a necessary requirement for that?
The term design is usually understood in too limited a sense. Design is reduced to aesthetics, yet that's only one aspect of it. I recently read a definition of design that I liked: "Design is not the object but the plan on which it is based."
New technologies are also only a vehicle, but they create new communication possibilities and forms. That interests me. I believe our job is to transfer those qualities that originate from an analogue world into a digital one. A sound knowledge of the old media is an enormous help when dealing with the new media.
Our aim is this: the new media should be as simple to use as a newspaper, as exciting as a film, as reliable as a radio, fed with as much content as a good book, as clearly designed as an atlas. And all that should take place "on screen". The true job facing us as designers in the new media is: to make the things work.

How do you see your role in the company?
My favourite role is being a creative sparring partner. Also, I work better in discussions than locked away in an ivory tower. I try to give impulses, and then various people work on their execution. Then we gather them all together again and analyse together until the partial aspects fit together and something new is generated. My function is that of a coach.

You have often mentioned the word "quality" as an essential criterion in your work; how would you describe it?
Quality is highly subjective. There's that wonderful Book "Zen, or the art of motorbike maintenance". It contains everything you need to know about quality in concise form. It's all about aspects of reduction. This Zen-like approach fascinated me even as a child: the simple, the comprehensible, the clear, the pure. And that in turn is a very good recipe for communication, because we live in such a complex world and can only get through to people with very clear messages. A lot of people think sobriety and clarity are elitist ...

... but your work is never sober ...
No, after all, you have to give the thing an emotional quality as well. Of course there are concessions to certain trends, to a prevalent mass taste. You have to look at what's accepted and how far you can go beyond the limits of this understanding. If I want to work in the media, I have to pay attention to my audience's attitude, to what it wants to have. That doesn't mean saying what it wants to hear. Especially in the field of corporate design, one very important point is that the products have to last several years - they're not throw-away products.

How can longer validity be created?
If you have a very simple, precise basic form to work with you can do anything with it. It's like a language that you develop a kind of grammar for. And this language is only good if it can be used to express anything and everything, and that is the art of making a good CD: developing a grammar that permits differentiation and is in line with the personality of the company.

Is your corporate design for the Austrian mobile telecommunications provider ONE a good example of that: a simple blue circle that stands for this communications enterprise?
ONE is an ideal client. We were able to do and design everything for them - all aspects of their communications. This opportunity of being "allowed" to create such a rounded and successful product is something only very few clients can offer you. ONE is a special case, which in my opinion is very clearly reflected in the quality of the product. Brand management is much easier if you have everything in your hands, from classic brand communication all the way to fair design and the Internet. It's great, but very unusual.

The agency has developed from media design towards classic brand management, it is now a branding agency. You already touched on the important role the companies play as a partner in creative processes ...
My favourite customers are always the ones who have a clear objective but leave it up to us how we want to achieve it. After all, I wouldn't hire a conductor so I could explain to him how to conduct the orchestra. You often have to deal with a mixture of badly formulated briefs and constant interference and sometimes the people even want to play a creative role themselves.
In the classic world of advertising it's rare to find courageous clients who dare to take risks. It really doesn't matter that much to me what product is involved. What's important is that there's a sensible dialogue with the client. And that is incredibly difficult in this world.

Lots of classic advertising agencies have problems precisely with the New Media.
A lot of them were caught napping. We on the other hand are not a classic advertising agency. But nor do I see our work as being limited to media. Our biggest clients at the moment - ONE in Austria, Allianz in Germany - are not media enterprises. For Allianz we are completely revising the corporate design from a digital media angle, plus strategic conceptual consulting for the Web presence: allianz.de and allianz. com. So an airline might just as easily come along and want us to work for them. It doesn't really matter what company it is, because they all have a communication problem or requirement.

Interview by Désirée Schellerer
Photography by Heribert Corn
This interview was also published in the german design magazine "design report" 04/2001, see also www.design-report.de.