Double Standards: No Nonsense Design

The space is uncompromising – you must accept the design ethos imposed upon you, or reject it. There is no middle ground, nowhere to transfer your gaze to the bland and everyday. The outside world is full of indifferent aesthetics – walk down any given street and you’re likely to see a lot of bad design. Garish signage, uncomplimentary font choices, badly-photoshopped posters, clumsy photographs or thoughtless council planning on a one-way road system, the list goes on. None of this is acceptable in the world of Double Standards. When you step through the threshold, past the graffiti, rubbish and hubbub, you enter another realm, one where every decision is a very conscious one. You are now entering Chris Rehberger’s head, and design just got political.

Chris strongly believes that being a graphic designer is not simply a job, it’s also laden with social responsibility. You as a designer are making a choice every time you create something. How relevant is it? How forgettable? Who do you target it to? What colours do you choose, if any? Perhaps most importantly, how clear and accessible is the message? Chris says, “When you are talking about social responsibility then you are also talking about sending a political message. Even if it’s a flyer for some department store, if it’s badly designed then you are sending out the wrong message. That’s political.” What I think Chris means when he tells me “design is political” is that every choice we make has a consequence. If you are making lazy, inarticulate design choices then you are making a statement that you do not care. This way of thinking can be applied to most, if not all, lines of work. But perhaps it is in design that poor craftsmanship stands out most, as we are forced to confront it everywhere we look.

Chris grew up in a small town near Stuttgart, and studied at Fellebach, the local university. Fellebach was a small school, with only 75 students while Chris was there. The course mostly focused on the technical side of design, leaving students to seek their own inspiration when it came to concepts. After graduating in 1990, Chris almost immediately jumped into the world of work, first trying his hand at a product design company before taking over the reins of art director at one, two, eventually three magazines simultaneously. Although this no doubt gave him an excellent grounding and education in design, it was also exhausting. “You must remember that back then you didn’t have computers to help you do everything. It was much more hands on. We had the layout sheets come in, and then you were on the floor fiddling around with Pritt Sticks and whatever.” With one magazine’s turbulent print week directly following another, Chris was essentially left without any free time whatsoever. “I was literally being sick after each issue came out. It was so stressful, I was really young still, and could not deal with such constant pressure.”

Chris left the editorial world, and his home region of Swabia, to move in with his older brother – acclaimed artist Tobias Rehberger – in Frankfurt. There he took up work in advertising, as well as making his first foray into teaching at the Frankfurt School of Art, quite something when you consider that he was now at the grand old age of 23.

I ask if the students were hesitant to take instruction from such a waifish youth. “Yeah, they were all older than me, mostly between 25-30, and they were kind off stand-offish at the beginning. They looked at me like ‘what could you possibly teach me?’ So I had to start working on the projects to let them know them that I could show, as well as tell. It was fine after that, but to get them to trust me I really had to get down on my hands and knees on the cutting room floor!” Chris is now a part-time professor at HFG Karlsruhe, but he works in a more conceptual, abstract capacity. “I don’t have to get down on my knees so often anymore.”

Although consistent and well-remunerated, the advertising work was quite dry; Chris feels that, particularly in Germany, advertising agencies are often afraid to take risks – even if the client might not be. He decided to leave advertising and launch himself into the uncertain terrain that is freelance work. Initially he started working through Start Advertising, a Munich-based creative agency who didn’t involve themselves in the design process, but found him work and looked after the planning and administrative side of things. This was a good arrangement for Chris, as not only could he focus himself on designing without interruption, but it also enabled him to meet and work with other designers in their stable, including luminaries such as Terry Jones of i-D magazine and John Warwicker, founder of design collective Tomato. In 1995 Chris moved to London, due to his wife landing a place on the City of Westminster’s photography course. He was always interested in England, in part because of the thriving design landscape, but mostly due to the London and ‘Madchester’ music scenes that were bubbling up at the time. The work he did for the British advertising agencies was more interesting than their German counterparts: “With BBA, Mother, Saatchi, the big agencies, it was good work. They were brave then. There was wit; it wasn’t like the irony-free zone I was finding in the Frankfurt agencies.” Chris worked non-stop from their small London apartment and barely got to see daylight, while the upmarket London opticians that his wife was working at attracted musicians like Noel Gallagher and Massive Attack, inducing no small amount of envy.