Dapper Dan visited Mirko Borsche, founder of graphic design studio Bureau Mirko Borsche, at his Munich HQ.
VASSILIS KARIDIS: Were you born in Munich?
MIRKO BORSCHE: I was born outside of Munich, near lake Tegernsee. It is a very beautiful lake—it looks like something from Heidi! The whole area looks like that.
VK: Then you went to study in London?
MB: I went to study in London because I had some police problems in Germany doing graffiti. I really had to leave.
VK: I knew you did graffiti but I didn’t know that! MB: I was really annoyed because, at that time, they were really watching my telephone, following me. I did a lot of trains, a lot of damage. It was easier to go somewhere else. I went to London and they offered me a master’s at Kingston because they thought I had already finished my studies. After half a year, I noticed that everyone knew so much more about graphic design. I didn’t know anything! I had to go back to Germany to do my diploma and try to get my master’s afterwards.
It was the beginning of the ‘90s so it was a really big party time in Germany—big raves and stuff like that and all of us spent all of our money at that time. The best and easiest way of making money then was to go into advertising. I started with really low advertising, you know this direct marketing related advertising, like “Call this number, and buy this and you get one for free”—all these coupons and stuff you get in your mail. I did this for a year, it worked out very well and I got a new job in another advertising agency, here in Munich, called .start. They don’t exist anymore, but at that time they did Levi’s and MTV for Germany.
Advertising worked out even better for me, so I got a chance to go to Hamburg, to a big advertising agency called Springer & Jacoby… They don’t exist anymore either, because obviously advertising went downhill! Things changed a lot, but at that time, it was still this Mad Man kind of scene. I was there I think for four years, and then I wanted to leave to go to New York because I was offered a really good job at DDB. Then my ex-girlfriend visited me from Munich and after two months she told me she was pregnant, and the thing was done.
Jung von Matt, quite a big advertising agency in Germany, wanted to open an office in Munich, and they asked me if I could run it. The day we moved back here, I realised that I was working seven days a week, 24 hours a day. I mean the main reason I returned to Munich was to see my kid so I was pretty stressed out… Then I got a nice job at the Süddeutsche Zeitung and every Monday they had a weekly magazine for young people, jetzt Magazin. That is how everything started. I stopped advertising and started with editorial work.
VK: It’s inspiring to hear that you started off from…
MB: From very low, yes! So I thought, because I was successful in advertising, I could do a magazine as a graphic designer really, really well, because I knew everything. I quickly discovered that designing a magazine is super hard work and I didn’t really know anything. I did one of the worst magazines ever for a few months— I was really bad and everybody hated me. The photographers didn’t want to work with me. Juergen Teller comes from that magazine… Frederike Helwig, Wolfgang Tillmans—they all started doing their first work for the jetzt Magazin. And all these guys didn’t want to take any pictures for me because I cropped them. I called guys like Teller and I was like, “I don’t want a square picture, just a close up.” They were all like, “Okay, we don’t earn any money for that, we’re quite famous… Who are you? You are not cropping our pictures!” After three months I was pretty depressed about everything. I either had to stop and go back to advertising or I had to change the magazine. At that point in time, all magazines—i-D, The Face, all the big ones—were all in grotesque fonts, and super modern in a way. At that point, I threw away all the fonts I had used before on everything—I just used this Cera font, the copy text font of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, and we became one of the first magazines in the world to just do this very classic newspaper layout. I stopped cropping the pictures and just had straightforward text and pictures. It was totally new at that point. For the first month, everybody hated me for that as well because it was too unusual.
VK: Given Germany’s history in typography, it must have been hard to convince people there.
MB: Totally. After a while, everybody started liking it, because it actually looked more like a book than a magazine. It changed the visuality of text as well and the authorship of the writers and the photographers. I took a really big step back as a designer—it was the time of Neville Brody, David Carson, and all these guys were a big appearance in their magazines; you could see their hands were working on it. At that point you couldn’t see me anymore. It was like something completely new. And, after a while, everybody started loving it, and that is how everything started.
VK: You have a special way of approaching typography, especially in your use of fonts. Do you have some sort of personal guidelines?
MB: It is like a feeling, like how you dress people. Actually, I feel more like a tailor. I think using typography, paper, photography and illustration is more like, “I see you and maybe these shoes would be nice for you, and you are going to wear these trousers”. You try to make a character out of it. I think for every product it is so important, even more so for magazines, that if you just tear out one page you must be able to say what magazine it comes from. That is what makes a good magazine. Typography is super important. And I don’t want to copy myself, so every time I try to find something new.
VK: Your studio seems very organised. Have you always worked in this kind of an environment?
MB: No, but it had to change. Sometimes we work on ten projects at the same time. So you really have to be organised, otherwise it’s a mess. We also had to organise our archives, because there are design museums that collect our stuff and when they ask for something, we need to be able to find it. There is always stuff lying around, projects we are doing at the moment, which have to find their own corner in the studio. Sometimes you start with something and then for a few weeks you can’t work on it because the texts are missing or the pictures are missing. For instance, we started working on the new issue of this magazine but now the client has disappeared for the last three weeks. The project is on a wall and when he calls back, we can continue from that point, not restart again. That is the most important thing, because we want every client to be special in a way and unique. We want a clear separation between all these projects.
VK: Are there clear guidelines with every project?
MB: Yes. We have three art magazines we are doing here, and two of them are very close content-wise. You have to be careful not to mix things up and that clients are happy. We do the Bavarian State Opera, and they have a very big orchestra, but we do one of the biggest orchestras in Germany as well. And what we don’t want is for them to be disappointed, because they are very colourful and the other one is a very typography-based project. There has to be a big gap between these clients. It is somehow related—you can compare it, but we try to make it not comparable, so that they can say, “This is beautiful, but ours is totally different.”
Originally published in Dapper Dan magazine 13, 2016.