Braun Publishing AG

New approaches to the function design's role to brand success

In his new book, the award-winning author examines the value of brands and the essential role of brand design. He provides a scientifically sound understanding of the underlying methods, modes of action, processes and objectives. His approach represents a shift in perspective: rather thancharging a brand with exclusive meanings, but the primary goal should be to reach as many people as possible and increase their willingness to purchase the brand's product.

Good design significantly contributes to the success of a brand by making it perceptible, recognizable and memorable, and thereby facilitating the purchasing process. The question of impact is, to a large extent, a question of form – the physical reality of the design and how it is communicated. Christoph Zielke presents the overall context in a compact way and provides well-founded insights for developing effective design strategies that sustainably increase brand value.

An exploration of the shift towards work environments that foster creativity, well-being and meaningful growth – reimagining the future of work as a place where people really want to be.

Although more and more tasks are being taken over by machines and artificial intelligence, humans remain the central element to the working world. For knowledge workers in particular, the choice of workplace will increasingly depend on where they can best utilize their skills, find meaning in their work, and experience a positive working environment. Where Future Grows explores this transformation of work and examines how future workplaces should be designed. An environment that considers both functional and aesthetic aspects will become increasingly important. 

The authors present a vision of a working world where the boundary between life and work dissolves, allowing human potential to be fully realized. Through detailed analyses of future work environments and a series of interviews, best-practice examples illustrate how workplaces should be designed to foster both professional and personal growth.

Practical insights and clear principles: offering a fresh perspective on designing for a future that is constantly changing

Artificial intelligence, automation and ever new data-driven tools are reshaping the creative world, and the roles of design and communication are evolving rapidly. The true innovation in this context is to create authenticity that endures beyond fleeting technological shifts. The Generative Mind encourages to rise above short-lived trends and view design as something alive and constantly evolving – in a world that refuses to stand still. 

The author combines systems thinking, generative design and a human-centered perspective to offer a new approach to working with technology to generate ideas, design and tell stories. In eight clear principles, he demonstrates how design can be understood as a process that challenges boundaries to transcend the visible and influence perception: a book for all those who understand creativity as a journey and not just a destination and aspire to actively shape the future of design.

Insightful texts on book design that explore the visual, tactile, and cultural aspects of books through the perspective of graphic designers

Fifty readings on book design, authored by Siri Lee Lindskrog and Amanda-Li Kollberg of Formal Settings, unfold across the pages of this volume. Drawn from a curated selection of titles in the private collection of the Hopscotch Reading Room – a conceptual bookshop and event space in Berlin – each text focuses on a single book, examining its visual and tactile qualities, from materials and layout to binding and typography. “Our aim is to understand the role and potential of books through a design lens, mapping what they communicate through their physical form.” 

The authors guide readers through the intricacies of book design, showing how form can become message – how a book can serve as a vessel, a statement, and an object of beauty in its own right. They explore and examine each book as a design object, situating it within the cultural movements, political climates, and economic conditions in which it was produced. This publication reveals how book design can foster shared languages and cultures, create space for the exchange and exploration of ideas, and underscore the social and cultural dimensions of design itself. 

With an afterword by designer, author, and teacher Prem Krishnamurthy, providing further context and insight into the project.

To Make Better Use of Typography

Typography is an essential part of visual communication design. The rapid changes brought about by digitalization also have a major impact on the type design process. Users need a solid knowledge base in order to deal with the seemingly unmanageable abundance of exciting and new fonts and to use them sensibly. 

A precise and inspiring guide for all those who want to understand and use typography in a focused and effective way, this volume provides both creative inspiration and a practical understanding. This is made possible in particular by a clear structural concept for classification into categories and subcategories, followed by a detailed look at the features. The authors present a selection of more than one hundred relevant typefaces, supplemented by historical background, user-relevant information and explanations of their special formal characteristics to make it easier to recognize the underlying formal principles.

The Creative Journey Behind the Design of Paris 2024

Each Olympic Games venue boasts a unique and distinctive identity, blending local and national character with international trends and the Olympic spirit. The design for Paris 2024 stands out with its clean, symbolic aesthetic, deeply rooted in the city's cultural and historical heritage. Hosting competitions at iconic locations was a key element in the success of this approach. 

Markus Osterwalder has meticulously curated examples from fields such as graphic design, typography, and product design to showcase the design identity of these extraordinary Games in their entirety. Through interviews with numerous contributors, the passionate Swiss collector vividly documents the creative process behind the Olympic image – from the initial proposal to its final realization. This book is a must-read for design enthusiasts, Olympic historians, and anyone fascinated by the interplay of sport, culture, and creativity.

A design approach to help brands, agencies and cultural institutions to set themselves apart by fusing storytelling and communication design with creative algorithms, data, human interaction and programming.

Where there is Data, there is Design. Today's creative professionals have more opportunities for expression than ever before – at the same time, the world is becoming increasingly difficult to depict as it is becoming more and more complex and nuanced. What the industry is missing is not (more) technology and data, but a new way of thinking. Design Unlimited presents an explorative way of thinking and designing that creates dynamic identities and meaningful connections between people and brands. 

Design is shown as a co-creative process between human beings, machines and the environment in which technology is no longer understood as a tool, but as a partner, and the diverse phenomena of our environment become the driving factor of design. Patrik Hübner and Larissa Lenze open up a new dimension that incorporates ideas, stories and designs and that allows thinking and designing without boundaries to make the unseen visible.

A comprehensive and highly visual overview, from the cultural and theoretical background to the amazing variety and everything one needs to know about the creative potential of emojis and how graphic designers can capitalize on this exciting communication trend. 

A means of expression for billions of people, emojis have established their function in our everyday lives. Increasingly complex in quality and quantity, these written language companions have long since transcended the realm of written communication to become a pop culture phenomenon of their own. This handbook is a manual and source of inspiration for anyone seeking to understand and use the full potential of emojis in visual communication. 

It combines cultural, historical, and theoretical backgrounds with practical application examples. Selected works from recent years demonstrate the formal diversity of emojis and offer inspiration for one’s own work. Specific cases are used to show how emojis can be used in very different ways in the implementation of design tasks and creative projects to thus become part of visual identities.

About how images can be made and staged, how head and hand can come together in the process and how pictures can be used to tell a story

The author's approach is not so much a step-by-step instruction with template-like schemes, instead it focuses on the intrinsic logic of things, their connections and relations, and the link between presentation and design. She invites readers to question the world with alert eyes, to discard conventions and to open up to other ways of thinking and new ways of seeing and approaching things: to dare to be playful and ready for any kind of experiment, to ultimately throw all rules overboard in order to find their very own artistic individuality.
How pictures can be used to tell a story, how are they made, and how the head and the hand collaborate in the creative process? Just as each image is unique, so are the individual intentions of the artists. The technical craftsmanship of HOW is as much a decisive criterion for the quality of an image as its contextual WHAT. In addition to all depiction methods, rules of design, and phenomena of perception, quite a few additional factors are important in making convincingly narrated images.

Although Arabic is the third-most widely used script in the world, there is a lack of sound typographic literature. This publication is a multi-disciplinary reference work that combines the latest academic research with applied typography. The focus on elements that pertain specifically to Arabic typography prevents overlapping with the comprehensive literature on Latin script typography, making the book relevant and accessible to the widest possible audience. The first part provides an in-depth synthesis on the typographic history and development of the Arabic script, bringing together a cohort of young scholars who are breaking new grounds in pursuing research excellence. In the more extensive second part, these historical foundations are complemented by a concise guide to Arabic typography through the lens of a design practitioner. Inspired by Jost Hochuli's standard work "Detail in Typography", the author vividly addresses all relevant micro-typographic parameters.

Almost a quarter of a century after the end of National Socialism in Germany, Otl Aicher was commissioned to design the "cheerful" Olympic Games in Munich 1972. He systematically and scientifically approached this task and liberated visual communication from national pathos by reducing it to the essential in the Bauhaus sense: the use. The manual, completed in 1967, contains a flexible system of colors, forms, and fonts on twenty-two fold-out sheets that enabled Aicher's team and partners to "play freely" and saved "unnecessary preparatory work and time-consuming detailed decisions." The outcome of more than 100 areas of design allowed him to create a wide-ranging identity-forming effect, while also setting new standards in corporate design. This book is a reprint of the original German edition with a booklet added with all texts in English.

Otl Aicher (1922–1991) was an internationally acclaimed graphic designer and educator, renowned for his corporate identity work, visual communication systems, and typography. With concise corporate designs for commercial enterprises such as the Deutsche Lufthansa and as co-founder and rector of the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm—an experimental design school in the spirit of the Bauhaus—he achieved a high reputation worldwide.

Airports are places with multi-layered identities that millions of people pass through and where cultures meet: On the one hand, the history and the design heritage of the particular country can be identified and local characteristics are intensified and reinforced almost stereotypically. On the other hand, airports represent hypermodern functional environments in which processes are internationally standardized and maximally efficient, with a strong emphasis on entertainment and consumption. Guidance systems navigate people through airports. The graphic language creates an image in the viewer’s head carrying the respective identity in its own compact form through color, fonts, and pictograms. The authors, both specialists in the field, decipher this identity and trace its emergence and evolution over the decades. From the perspective of information design, they examine and analyze the wayfinding systems of approximately 70 airports by aligning their identities and functions.

Every day there is something happening in the world of typography and graphic design – something new being created in Buenos Aires, Paris, Tel Aviv, Tehran, Seoul or Melbourne. The most inspiring, trendsetting and enduring stories, events and works have been collected here to guide the reader to the highlights: 52 for 52 weeks, written by more than 40 experts. Releases such as the legendary 1975 NASA Graphic Standards Manual are presented and various creative approaches discussed. New fonts, typeface designers and foundries are introduced, classic American fonts newly interpreted and the question of why new fonts are always needed examined. Important new logos are presented, big industry events such as the Typo in Berlin reported on and the winners of the European Design Awards presented. At the end of the book there are dedications to Adrian Frutiger and Alan Rickman, who was once a graphic designer.

Every human being has creative abilities that often remain undiscovered. Inspired by alphanumeric characters, symbols and geometric elements Willi Kunz has, over several years and in regular short sessions, documented his creative thoughts in his sketchbooks. The symmetrical dimensions of a square are always the defining frame in which he produces three aesthetically connected line drawings. With its manifold black and white illustrations this book is a source of inspiration – not only for designers.

Peter Olpe has been manufacturing customized pinhole cameras since 1978. In 2012 he donated 90 of his cameras to the Swiss Camera Museum in Vevey where the collection will be exhibited. In images and texts the book "Out of Focus" presents these cameras and, in addition, tells the story of the author‘s ever-changing interests in pinhole photography – a written documentation of Peter Olpe’s work as a designer, photographer, illustrator and teacher. Furthermore, the creative work of 36 photographers is presented, all of whom Peter Olpe invited to take photos with one of his pinhole cameras in a kind of „art barter“. His offer was simple. If the resulting images were of a quality to be used in the book and the exhibition in Vevey, the camera would pass into the possession of the artist. During the project, Olpe designed many unique tailor-made cameras for the artists – and just as many diverse and surprising photographs were created using them.

The architectonic possibilities of the pitched roof seem almost unlimited and are all the more interesting for today’s architects, in that the subject has been neglected for such a long time. By thematic plates this publication shows the whole spectrum of possibilities that are opened up by pitched roofs. Their potential for the design of the outer façade and its relation to context and interior is shown in a systematic fashion. Individual aspects are explored in depth in articles by specialists.

Risography, named after the Japanese firm Riso, is a digital printing process based on screen printing techniques that was developed in the transition phase from mechanical to digital printing. Although the printer looks like a copying machine, the colors are transferred onto the paper without the use of heat or chemicals, saving energy and making the process ecologically friendly. The Risograph printer is at the forefront of a new creative explosion. More and more artists and designers all over the world are rediscovering this stencil duplicator for themselves, sparking a unique and unexpected renaissance in analogue printing. And Risography is just the most prominent technique in a new wave of cutting-edge contemporary design, one that is also recuperating forgotten technologies such as the Gestetner and the mimeograph. A comprehensive introduction that addresses past, present and future is followed by an essay about the key pioneers in the contemporary risography scene. In the chapter Risoworld notable risography-oriented publishers, printers and design studies from around the world are presented. At the heart of the volume are fabulous, hugely diverse examples of Riso-printing, including postcards, magazines, posters, flyers, and experimental printed products, all of which inspire through vivacity of colour, unique textures and, above all, the perfectly imperfect authenticity of Risography.

Once an architectural project has emerged from the perfect atmosphere of the computer, the drawings and the 3-D models, it inevitably comes up against the logic of the real world. In most cases, the encounter is painless. But sometimes things go wrong, what remains are unfulfilled expectations and broken dreams of overly optimistic architects, owners, and clients. This volume features a selection more or less notorious archiflops scattered over the globe, which are grouped in various thematic sections. Each project is described and its circumstances analyzed and extensively documented via photos. The reader is taken to monumental ghost towns in Asia, grotesque remnants of amusement parks, for example in the USA, and a nuclear power plant in Crimea. The author is not aiming to uncover faults and condemn failed projects but rather to contemplate on how difficult and nearly impossible it is to predict the future of any type of endeavor.