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Sascia Reibel

Karlsruhe, Ge

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Sascia Reibel is a graphic and product designer. Her focus lays on printed matter, especially books and posters, with a strong detail on typography. She engages in projects within the cultural sector, and education.

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Sascia Reibel is a graphic and product designer. Her focus lays on printed matter, especially books and posters, with a strong dedication for typography. She engages in projects within the field of culture, art, and education. She graduated in communication design at the University of Art and Design Karlsruhe with summa cum laude in 2019 and has also studied in the design master program of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, China. Her work has been honoured with several awards, including «Most Beautiful Swiss Books», «Most Beautiful Books from all over the world», «Bronze Nail, ADC», as well as the «Badge of Typographic Excellence, TDC New York. Since 2019 she is also an academic assistant at the Institute for interactive practices of digital design at HfG Karlsruhe.

I would like to start with "Intrus Sympathiques", Chaque Chose a place, everything has its place. The seminar of the same name, which was chaired by Prof. Urs Lehni in 2015, set itself the goal of developing concepts, contributions and materials for a publication on Bernard Chadebec, because until then there was not a single book about his work. Bernhard Chadebec (born 1943) is probably the most widely publicized poster designer in France - and still one of the least known. Over a period of more than forty years, he designed countless poster motifs for accident prevention and job security. During this time he was employed as an in-house graphic designer at the INRS (Institut national de recherche et de sécurité), the French Institute for Safety and Prevention of Accidents at Work.

The concept and design for Intrus Sympathiques was developed by @_tatjanasturm, @philzumbru.ch , @simonknebl and myself in close collaboration with @olivierlebrun and Urs Lehni. The book was published in conjunction with the first monographic exhibition of Chadebec's work in the Écomusée Creusot Montceau at Rollo Presse Verlag.

Chadebec himself has only collected his work loosely, and has not built up a consistent archive. His relationship to his work does not correspond to the "classic" of a graphic designer, a neat documentation pretty much did not happen at all. The documentation was then finally done by us; we took care of the poster repro-photography and also the image processing and print preparation.

The starting point for the concept of the book was that it is not possible to imitate the striking effect of a poster in its original size in a print object, but that is not really necessary anyway. An isolated presentation of the posters did not make sense, as that would cause them to artificially inflate their importance, snatched from their context within the factories and placed on a high pedestal. The clean repro is in contrast to the actual handling and the origin of the material. The reproductions were printed in 3 special colors and black, and any mistakes in the original print productions, such as color overlaps and shifts, were deliberately not removed as a charming detail.

Instead of clinging to the poster, we decided to fold the reproductions of the posters and then integrate them folded into the book, creating interesting juxtapositions of type and shape and color. Repro photography also resulted in the format, which was based on the proportions of the dimensions of the posters, and then ultimately resulted in the quadfold and the highest possible resolution of 300 dpi. By folding, we broke with the usual fact that there are bound pages and page sequences in a book due to the binding, because one leafs through printed and unprinted pages alternately with folds and non-folds. The feeling for the actual size of the unfolded poster is still present the book, and not infrequently people tried to unfold the posters, and then accidentally tore out some pages. The Safety Museum Écomusée Creusot Montceau was also quite sure when received the book, that something must have gone wrong.

The posters are supplemented by monochrome reproductions as an appendix and, among other texts, by an essay that records the history of accident prevention and prevention in the workplace and examines how hazard warnings are conveyed and why Chadebec is unique in this regard. We have worked mainly in coming up with the concept, discourse, the image sequences; finally, handling the typography Urs and Olivier have taken over.

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The year 2014-2015 marked a change in the university history of the HfG Karlsruhe: After the departure of the rector Peter Sloterdijk, an initially unfilled personnel gap opened up - the simple cover of the annual report is a symbol of this break. We wanted to turn the annual report back into an object that students would also like to own, and then decided that we wanted to make the cover unique over the course of the print run. After some design tests, and the idea to produce the cover in digital printing, in order to be able to print 1000 different covers with the edition of 1000 pieces, we decided to intervene in the printing process instead of digitally creating 1000 different covers.

The cover starts in print as a full-face red front. During printing, the printer turned off the machine's inking unit, but the sheets were still printed. Since less and less color hung on the bobbin, the course of pink turned out to be almost white, so that almost every copy has a different color.

The design of the annual report of the HfG has been done by 2xGoldstein since 2004. In 2014, the report was then announced for the first time as a project for students. @nncrns, @lino.santo and I formed a group and got the opportunity to work as a design team. We did not have a project together in this formation - but in combination we worked well as a group and enjoyed working together. Being three was a good size to do this job. We had no restrictions, and so we basically had a carte blanche.

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We decided to first analyze how the reports worked in previous years and then figure out what we can do differently to represent the HfG. It was important for us to give both image and text decidedly more space, which we took literally and therefore chose the largest possible format, which leaves 16 pages of space on an offset printing plate with optimum paper utilization. We noticed a little late that the books were then too heavy and too big for normal shipping bags. The generous font sizes convey the idea of space, and in the individual department chapters, the photo and text of individual projects are linked with each other via cross-references.

We kept the typography and the layout simple, which logistically proved to be the right decision, because the whole coordination and the tasks in the background still had to be managed. In doing so, we learned a lot about print production and dealing with a high print run, managing budget, communicating with printers, and what kind of co-ordination effort is invisible behind the end result.

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The seminar "MAU-HfG: Go Public" took place successively in 2015 in Tokyo and Karlsruhe. I designed the brochure independently, in consultation with Prof. Bielicky, as a person who did not attend the seminar or the excursions. The publication documents two excursions and two exhibitions in Tokyo and Karlsruhe.

When reviewing the image archive, which was compiled by the participants, I acted intuitively, with the intention of wanting to build more of a narrative, a feeling for the respective cities in the image sections, rather than a solemn documentation of the two excursions. I allowed myself to be guided by small mental disturbances, or Deja-Vu moments. I had the feeling that I was only able to get involved with the flood of images and then tried to reconstruct the experiences again within the publication.

Within masses of pictures of cities, which can hardly be more different from another, I came across two images that created one of the aforementioned Deja-Vu moments. One could imagine that it is the same parking lot from different perspectives, although one comes from Karlsruhe and one from Tokyo. Here is the front and back of the book, with Japanese, and English cover

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When you open the book from the front, you are browsing through the photo chapter, the exhibition, and the lectures that took place in Tokyo, Western reading direction, and Western perspective.

As an analogy to the fact that there were two excursions, two exhibitions, two groups of students in two different cities, I divided the publication exactly in half in half. Here you can see the two posters announcing the respective exhibitions.

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If you were to open the book at the back, you leaf through the photo chapter of the excursion to Karlsruhe, the exhibition in Karlsruhe, and the lectures that took place in Karlsruhe - in Japanese reading direction, and from a Japanese perspective.

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Before my graduation, I wanted to expand my field of vision again and spent a semester studying at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. There were no plates in my first accommodation, but there was an Ikea not far from the university, which is the obvious place to stock up on cheap tableware.

What struck me there was that superficially everything looked like I knew it from Germany, but the use of the furniture store was quite different from what I was used to from my visits. IKEA.CN is the result of observations I made between August 2017 and January 2018 during a stay in Beijing, China.

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Cars as status symbols are omnipresent––however, nowhere in the world have I ever seen more luxury cars than in Beijing. The same thing goes for designer clothes, shoes and handbags (most of which are fake, though it’s hard to tell as replicas have become virtually indistinguishable from originals). The effect of this constant exposure to luxury goods, however, is imminent indifference––yet another pair of Balenciaga sock boots here, another quilted Chanel bag there. Fake or real, who knows? The uprising Chinese middle class of today shells out a significant chunk of their income for representative goods such as cars, clothes, or the next It-tea––deemed worth the cost of hiring someone that will spend hours queuing in shops in their stead, just to snap a picture for WeChat (the chinese equivalent to Whatsapp) before discarding the tea unused––status over matter. Consequently, the focus of spending is not directed towards furnishing one’s own home. As it is a place hidden to the outside world, Chinese do not regard the home as being representative of one’s identity the way Europeans do. This seems surprising in a country that has cultivated feng shui, a practice of creating harmony in one’s surroundings, for centuries. Today, it has lost most of its importance in the capitalist drive for consumption and need for representation, a development that eerily evokes the times of the Cultural Revolution when Chinese traditions were forcefully oppressed. The sociopolitical movement that dominated Chinese society from 1966 to 1976 was launched by Mao Zedong, then Chairman of the Communist Party of China. Its stated goal was to preserve ‘true communist ideology’ by purging remnants of capitalist thinking and Chinese traditions, seeking to reimpose Maoism as the predominant ideology within the Party after its prime earlier in the century. The purge left temples abandoned, bellies empty, senior officials disposed of, a big percentage of the population displaced, and to the present day, a population too afraid to speak up about the events.

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During the last decades, globalization and Americanized media culture have resulted in the popularity of the ‘western lifestyle,’ shipped to the rest of the world as a consumable and desirable export product. China might be particularly susceptible to this lure as a result of its traumatic history of oppressed individuality, and it is not surprising that corporations are now taking advantage of these favorable circumstances. IKEA opened its first branch in Beijing in 2006, drawing around seven million visitors per year to its all too well known labyrinth-like floor plan the size of a nightmarish 44.000 square meters. It has become a common Saturday afternoon activity for Beijing’s residents to take a trip to one of the two branches, located respectively inside the second and third city ring. Hanging out on one of the many sofas, taking a nap in the cozy beds, and giving their kids the chance draw a breath of ‘fresh’ (meaning filtered and smog-free) air is of greater priority than hunting down Billy shelves. Taking a nap in IKEA is now such a common thing to do that even a term was coined for it: 露소敎얾, (‘Living House Furniture Nap’) used all across China.

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I decided to visit the stores every other weekend to document my observations by taking pictures. The result is a photographic essay that captures my very personal, euro-centric view towards an environment that, experienced in the context of another culture, felt strangely familiar, yet at the same time very foreign. To visually emphasize the effect these overcrowded, loud, and often exhausting visits had on me, I generated a custom color profile in which the corporate IKEA colors blue and yellow are multiplied with the other color channels of the images, resulting in an over-amplified color scheme and creating a very dreamlike, surreal impression. The images are placed at full bleed, corresponding to the sensation of overwhelm one would get when walking through the entrance of the store onto the sales area, the canteen, and finally toward the exit of the store. To supplement the visual material, I asked 12 acquaintances about their habits of sleeping or working in public spaces.

@book_boy_hfgk is a student's initiative from HfG Karlsruhe. Book Boy publishes student's work. Book Boy is therefore a publishing platform. IKEA.CN is available through Book Boy thanks to a generous funding, which allowed me to produce a print run of 200 copies

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When I came across the journal entries of 'Robert Shield,' a man who compulsively wrote down what he did every five minutes over a period of twenty-five years, and slept only two hours at a time to capture his dreams, I was intrigued by the urge to capture memories in such detail and the sheer amount of notes he left behind. The vocabulary he uses is very simple, and the inscriptions are a mix of everyday things like 'changing lightbulbs', but also thoughts on life itself. Because the diary is archived in 95 boxes, but still kept 38 years with no public access, I could not pursue my curiosity any further. But the fascination with remembering and documenting moments remained.

My research on the subject of remembrance initially took place first of all through snapshots and a personal examination of the subject rather than on the basis of scientific foundations on the subject of memory and forgetting. My approach was to understand myself as a mediator of someone else's experiences without ignoring my subjective perspective from a designer's point of view. In a first test I tried to deal with remembering and forgetting through smartphone photography. Here are some of my shots that felt like a facet of remembering or forgetting while I was taking the photo or viewing it at some point. I understand my personal photo archive as a kind of outsourcing of memories into another medium, as many do with more or less consistency.

I then decided not to deal with my own memories but to deal with those of others, and use conversations as an way to generate content. Before the spread of printed writing, a trained memory was much more important than today because there was no way to store thoughts or mechanically reproduce written ones. Knowledge transfer was therefore mainly oral. I wanted to build on that, and therefore decided to generate knowledge about memory with the help of people who, because of their own experiences, almost inevitably became experts in the subject, as a person with memory impairment. Over the next few weeks, I developed a questionnaire that I wanted to use to contact people who are distinguished by their special ability to remember, be it very good or very bad. I searched in forums and posts on the Internet for people who would agree to answer questions. After a couple of weeks, I found some people, but it turned out that communication was not really working through e-mail, and in the end every contact led to nothing, and I could not even tell if it was simply because my contacts just forgot about me. After all, this first contact gave me the opportunity to develop and try out a comprehensive catalog of questions that should help me later. At the end of October I reopened my contact requests, now looking for people with whom I can have real conversations on the spot, in the same room. Fortunately, I was able to drive to Hamburg a few weeks later to speak in a neuropsychological doctors office with 7 people who have different degrees of memory impairment. The talks with them lasted about an hour and all took place in the same room. I have hardly edited these interviews in the further process. I was not sure how the talks would go, also because it was the first time I ever had an interview on my own. Added to that was the difficulty that I had no contact with the persons before the interviews. So I could not really prepare for the situation, and I took the risk that these uncertain discussions should be the basis for the content of the publication. At the beginning I was very sure that the transcripts would only be the starting point for something else.

The Alzheimer's disease of the participant from whom the quotes from this posts (this is in german, the other post is the same text in English, roughly translated, trying to include grammatical and syntax errors in his way of speaking) come from is so advanced that he could answer almost none of my questions because he had already forgotten the question after half a sentence of his answer. And yet he answered the question: "Do you have the feeling that sometimes it can have advantages when you forget things? with: „I have not actually found any disadvantages, if I can not pronounce anything, then I talk until I can do that.“ His handling of forgetting impressed me, I went into the conversation with the idea that I would come out of them with a rather depressed mood, but each of the participants in different, but always kind of positive way dealt with it, what surprised me and also motivated my work.

As his earliest memory, this interviewee describes the 1962 Flood in Hamburg, which he can only vaguely and fragmentarily tell - so it almost sounds like a mixture of the collective memory of Hamburg citizens to the flood of the century and his own memory. This fuzziness, the ambiguity in the choice of words when attempting to put memories into speech, is, I think, similar to subjectivity in the design of content. Language is only a limited tool to convey memories, so does the design of "between five and nine"–the title of my diploma project–allows and even makes use of uncertainty as a carrier of information on a level of ambiguity and blurriness. Conducting the interviews thus marks a point at which I became aware of this entanglement: between the topic that my design deals with (memory) and design itself.

In order to counterbalance the gravity and seriousness of the content of the interviews, I tried a new design approach every day, pursuing a different idea. Whether an idea works or does not work, does not matter, it was simply tested over the course of a day. This has created a large open design pool from which I could later select and discard. I tried to keep the design and the evaluation of the design strictly separate from each other in order to judge with some distance what works and what I want to think about. Such ideas were among others: My own memories illustrate: Problem was: which memory? How can my experience fit in with those of the conversation participants?

In addition, for example, I have been looking for photographic material that sticks within the memory of most people, (collective image memory) because I felt I had to supplement the interviews with external material, but then I quickly came across stereotypes, and made the decision to really work only with the content that I can derive from the week in Hamburg. Taking the time for a test session in which I could approach the subject without expectation then allowed me to take a more grounded approach to the next step in the design.

The questionnaire that I developed in advance included 26 questions that I varied according to the conversation - some of the questions were asked all the participants, the others were variables (eg, only 8 questions to some and 20 to others, depending how the conversation developed). The questionnaire was also a tool to make comparability possible despite all variance.

Three of the questions I have asked build up the pictorial level in the publication: 1. Are there any items that are particularly important to you in everyday life? Items like smartphones, watches, calendars or handkerchiefs have been mentioned several times, and as an analogy to the fact that I can reconstruct someone else's memories only from my own experience, these objects are built from a fund of pottery shards, and presented as one image layer in the book.

2. How do you imagine how your memory works? The participants were asked to answer this question graphically–and then I responded to the resulting illustrations with numerous layers that overlay the original image, visualizing the vagueness of the descriptions and also the impossibility of drawing a precise picture.

3. Can you describe the room we are in while your eyes are closed? After completing the interview, each interviewee was asked by me to describe the room we were in with their eyes closed. From these imaginary spaces of memory of the people, I then made with the help of @victor_vanwetten digital replicas that function as subtitled, scenic image lines as an introduction to the interview texts in the book. Wolfgang Ullrich describes in "Die Geschichte der Unschärfe" the assumption that inner psychological states are not representable. Anyone who thinks that "one could describe or portray an inner picture like an apple, [...] and anyone who thinks that a picture or a photo can basically correspond to a memory or an idea, seems to be seduced by those metaphors , [is] a victim of a fixed idea. " The idea that inner states are not clearly communicable but can only be interpreted consumed my thought process behind the visual material of the publication. It lives on the ambiguity that settles between imagination and mediation.

In dealing with the text, I felt like walking on a slippery slope: on the one hand, the typography should complement the content of the texts, on the other hand, they should not override the actual words of the interviewee or mock their way of speaking. It was therefore important to be sensitive in dealing with the interviewees, and yet to approach what can be an appropriate representation. In the sense of "the word dog does not bark," it was important not to become too literal. There should not ever be one form for each of the conversations, but I decided to use points of reference that would allow me to find a visual form for all the interviews. The length of sentences, leaps in speech and vocabulary thus serve as parameters that affect the design. The answers to each question start left-justified, and move one step further to the right with each jump in content. This results in visualizations of the speech patterns, which also make a comparison between the interview partners possible.

In order to further break down the vocabulary used to talk about memories, without evaluating them, or to show a list of words that appear x times, there is a more intuitive, alphabetical word sequence in the appendix of the book. Depending on what the reader focuses on, you can draw conclusions about repetitions, word lengths, word variance and vocabulary from this dense typographic memory carpet.

The interviews are followed by texts by Isabel Mehl, which supplement the discussions with another level: the personal point of view, from the perspective of a person without an explicit memory limitation. In her work, the question of remembering is just as relevant and up-to-date, and she thinks and writes with loose connotations alsong the the anonymous interviews. An introductional text by me and the texts by Isabel Mehl frame the publication. All content in the book that is not interview is inserted like a fragment towards the gutter of the book and framed differently than the rest of the publication.

The title of the work is "Between five and nine". The first text that I read in my research on memory is about Miller's Law by George Miller. He describes the fact that a human being can only present 7 ± 2 (ie between 5 and 9) information units in the short-term memory at the same time. This number is genetically determined and can not be increased by training. Coincidentally, I have spoken for the publication with 7 people who have all taken place between nine and five; one of the persons won the game 77, 7777 € and made an Aryuveda holiday in India and got to know Harpe Kerkeling there. That's just a small part of a lot of text in this publication. At first I thought that the interviews would only be starting material, because I did not know how useful the material would be, now a publication has been created, which for the most part deals with text. The motivation behind this publication stems from the conviction that books function as both a medium for showing and communicating content, while remaining in close intertwining with the designer's subjective experience. I was interested in how to set the course to generate material, but then finally had to get involved in the situation, and only after the talks knew with what kind of content I would now deal with. I started the design process before the talks, but finally there is nothing, or only fragmentary, to recognize it in the finished book. I really wanted to respond to the material and then adjust the terms of the book. In the design process, I did not want to squeeze into existing grids, but instead carry the content through the concept instead of forming it.

The scenic image series could also be found in the exhibition of this project, not as an introduction to the interviews, but as an access to the publication itself. During my exhibition, there was a 5 x 5 meter replica of the room the interviews took play, on each of the four walls a view of the 7 memory rooms of the interviewees were projected. The floor of the room has been lined with black carpet to separate it more clearly from the rest of the room and move the projections further into the field of vision. They are accompanied by a sound recodring of the description of the interviewees, in which they verbally reproduce what they remember. Thanks for the images to @michelle.mantel

Thanks for reading along, Bye bye!