DD2000(Design discourse) Cristoph Niemann.

Cristoph Niemann is an Illustrator/Graphic Designer from Germany who moved to the US in the nineties he worked extensively for the New York Times and the New Yorker Magazine, he has also co-authored several children's books.

A couple of Niemann's covers

The subject of his video on Gestalten.tv http://www.gestalten.tv/motion/christoph-niemann was not so much his working method as his philosophy of communication and role of an Illustrator in today's media.  How people relate to his work,weather it is possible to relate visually speaking,with someone on the other side of the world,a joke he says,is only a joke if your audience laugh. Cristoph believes insecurity is helpful in the work of any designer,it forces you to re-think and sharpen your work,this never being completely satisfied with your work philosophy,is extremely common amongst practitioners in the creative industries,he also states towards the end of the interview that the constant appraisal of one's own work can make the designer somewhat neurotic (that's our future folks, paranoid and disappointed.......joke!).

On the industry, Cristoph was adamant that his clients were key to his becoming a better illustrator/designer though he does say it is natural for the creative to bitch about the demands/constraints of the clients briefs,he enjoys the process of having someone to "bounce" idea's off, but I think this probably because he has had some very good art-director's to work with (I don't think the New Yorker Magazine employs crap art-directors). Speaking of which,Cristoph believes it important for the art director to KNOW their readers and what they will "get" and what they won't.

When Cristoph moved back to Germany he wanted to try new things (tiling bathrooms using the tiles like pixels to create pictures/patterns,making a book Illustrating life in New York using LEGO). He also began a weekly visual blog on The New York Times webpages http://niemann.blogs.nytimes.com/ on which he makes voodoo dolls,witty observations and visually dissects the ephemera of modern society,one of the side efffects of this weekly blog is some of the blog viewers believe Cristoph to be suffering from Attention Deficit Disorder or more bizarrely bladder problems,(Yank's eh). I heartily recommend it for its simplicity and creative use of the graph-chart.

Ed Allen