Preferably Print– the Bureau Mario Lombardo
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According to a survey carried out within the framework of the programme Improve Design Business, implemented under the auspices of the International Design Centre (IDZ) Berlin, in 2006 graphic, web and multimedia designers together with other visual designers in Germany generated a turnover five times higher than that of their colleagues from the product and industry design sectors.
With an overall turnover in the design industry of 14.9 billion Euro, this means we are talking here about the impressive sum of 12.6 billion Euro. The market for communication design has grown Interestingly, in the communication sector most assignments are carried out not by big agencies, which of course exist in Germany - MetaDesign, SpiekermannPartners or Factor Design, to name but a few - but by small agencies with fewer than ten employees. |
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Individual, experimental style
One such agency is the Bureau Mario Lombardo, founded in Cologne in 2004 and now based in Berlin, consisting of the 36-year-old founder Mario Lombardo with a team of four more graphic artists and a copy writer. The Bureau Mario Lombardo describes itself as working mainly with print media moving within the cultural context of music, fashion, photography, design, architecture, contemporary art and TV design.
Lombardo himself has been responsible for various music, DVD and fashion labels as well as magazines since 1998. He achieved his breakthrough with the pop-culture magazine Spex, which was launched as early as 1980, and he was its art director from 2001 until the end of 2006. There, within a very short time, Lombardo became renowned for his individual, experimental style. Meanwhile Mario Lombardo has become art director of the monthly cultural magazine Liebling, also taking charge of its relaunch in 2008. This "magazine for fashion, film, music and art" appears once a month, but its paper and Berlin-style format are more reminiscent of a daily newspaper. |
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Thinking outside the box
In spring of this year, when he was asked by the magazine form about his favourite magazines, Mario Lombardo came up with a wide spectrum: from the satirical magazine Simplicissismus via the cultural magazine 032c (art director: Mike Meiré) to the typography/fashion periodical Fairy Tale from the agency Vier5 (Marco Fiedler and Achim Reichert). That thinking outside one's own box is by no means detrimental is proven by the fact that Lombardo has meanwhile become a welcome speaker at conferences and is in great demand as a visiting professor at various design academies such as the School of Art and Design (HfG) in Offenbach, the University of the Arts (UdK) Berlin, the Universities of Applied Sciences in Düsseldorf und Potsdam, the Merz Akademie in Stuttgart and the University of the Arts (HfK) in Bremen.
Visual Leader 2008
Andrej Kupetz |
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online-redaktion@goethe.de
