Ellie Kurttz — a good friend from London — came over to spent Christmas and New Year’s Eve with us. She’s a professional photographer who mainly works for the Royal Shakespeare Company. She had an exhibition at the Embassy of Brazil in London. Check out her brilliant work here (currently updating).

I wish everone a Merry Christmas and all the best for the next year — and remember: be careful what you wish for, you might get it.

I’m very happy to announce the design of this year’s Christmas cards for Menschen bei Maischberger. If you found this in your mail, take a closer look at the snowflakes. They are formed of the three words in “Menschen bei Maischberger” and the numbers in “2007”. In each snowflake the word is highlighted with a silver spot color.

Los Berlin Beamboys show an video installation at the St. Elisabeth church in Berlin-Mitte — two huge balls in the middle of the church and combined with a surround sound concept. The entrance is free, but I think it’s much better to see it when it’s darker. You can watch a video clip here.

Every year the team at 3x33 arranges a special designers Christmas market — a nice spot to find unique presents, have a good coffee and listen to some live jazz music.

The website of audioberlin – The Audiotainment Company has been relaunched. I did a whole new design for the website. It’s not finished completely yet, as the head of each page will have different interactive animations with sounds — a playground for things to discover. The basics of the back-end (originally programmed by the masterminds at area42) were transferred but I had to change the source code for the relaunch, though. Many thanks to Matthias and Jan at audioberlin!

A friend of mine told me about this funny tittle toy. The PicooZ is a light-weight helicopter that can be easily controlled even in your living-room. I’ve just unpacked it and as you can see in this clip I still need some practice…

This week the design class at L4 started with their final practical exam. They will have to design a logo and a sales folder with several sheets or a website for a catering company. I’m supervising them taking care everything is according to plan. They have 10 working days to write a concept and prepare themselves for the practical test. But next Thursday they will only have about 6 hours to do their whole work for the sales folder, create a PDF for offset printing and presenting a mockup of the final product. They have already come up with a couple of good concepts today.

For the first time after 10 years, one of my favorite magazines of all time — Tempo — published a special issue today. It’s a nonrecurring 380-pages edition and probably already sold out. The cover of Kate Moss doesn’t impress me very much, but I’ve got a copy and I remember the days when I read the Tempo in my “youth” and the shock when I heard that they knocked off the magazine. It was one of the freshest and most unique magazines with great articles during that time. They were one of the first in Germany who started the so-called New Journalism.

The media.net Berlin Brandenburg had their 20th media summit and 5th anniversary on Wednesday. It was hosted by Tita von Hardenberg interviewing the mayor of Berlin, Klaus Wowerei. As always it was a very nice event and we had a great time at the after-party. You can find more pictures here.

Today was the release of the German DVD Wie in der Hölle (L’enfer) — a French movie by director Danis Tanovic (No Man’s Land) with Emmanuelle Béart, Karin Viard, Marie Gillain, Carole Bouquet and the legendary Jean Rochefort.
In collaboration with Peter Ruschel I designed the poster, lobby sets and press folder for TOBIS Film earlier this year.

On Saturday night I was on a very special event: Apollo und Hyacinth at the Bode Museum. The Bode Museum was just re-opened in October and now they present Mozart’s first opera in the halls of the museum on the Museum Island. The Chamber Orchester of the Berliner Philharmoniker directed by Christoph Hagel played. Brilliant vocalists and an excellent dance ensemble choreographed by Ismael Ivo completed the superb musical performance. If you have the chance — go and see it!