Speaker: Lars Harmsen
Location: Karlsruhe, Germany
Websites: www.magmabranddesign.de, www.melvilledesign.de, www.volcano-type.de, www.bastard-project.com, www.slanted.de
Case
The Sports Bible — Encyclopedia for Activewear, Outerwear, Streetwear & Sports Fashion. Each copy is one-of-a-kind
MAGMA Brand Design designed the Sports Bible, an in-depth fashion-based encyclopedia of sport and sport-inspired style for Sportswear International containing nearly 600 sports-fashion terms over 400 pages.
By using a new and very special printing technique every copy of the Sports Bible presents with a different color combination on the cover. No two books are the same.
Background
Lars Harmsen (1964)
Dipl. Graphic-Designer
MAGMA Brand Design GmbH & Co. KG, Karlsruhe
Melville Brand Design GmbH, München
Lars Harmsen is one of the two executive directors of the MAGMA Brand Design agency in Karlsruhe (founded in 1996 with Ulrich Weiss). The focal point of his work is corporate and editorial design. He is also partner and creative director for the Munich agency Melville Brand Design (associated office with MAGMA Brand Design.)
Lars founded the Volcano-Type font lable with Ulrich Weiss in 1996, which now distributes over 200 fonts. In 2004 he created the weblog Slanted. A Type-magazine with the same name has also been published since 2005.
From 2000 until 2007, Harmsen was also partner and creative director for the Starshot agency in Munich. With Starshot he edited biannualy the Useless Magazine, an independent sport and lifestyle publication. In 2008, a new branch was established in Munich: Melville Brand Design GmbH.
Harmsen is also the author of design and typography books. In 2004, the book Versus (DGV- Die Gestalten Verlag) came out and received numerous awards (red dot, most beautiful german books, Berlin Type). The book BASTARD – choose my identity (Actar Barcelona, www.bastard-project.com) was published in 2006, and examines cultural identities and the influence of globalization and web on culture and design. In 2007, the book “Wii love Arts” for Nintendo was released, for which Harmsen worked as creative director for the Starshot agency and Mr. Wolf. In 2008 the tear-off calender „Typodarium 2009“ came out at Verlag Hermann Schmidt Mainz. Lars Harmsen and Raban Ruddigkeit are the editor of this calender.
Lars Harmsen had also a university teaching position at the School of Design in Pforzheim and Karlsruhe. Furthermore, he is a solicited speaker for many conferences (Face-to-Face/Stuttgart, Typo Berlin, Heimatdesign/Essen, Colophon/Luxembourg, 3rd ICTVC Thessaloniki etc).