Despite the fact that their name means 'Design for Design,' MetaDesign is more than just a design firm. They boast a staff of more than 200 creative professionals who call themselves technologists, planners, designers, and more. Erik Spiekermann, who came into...
[more]Despite the fact that their name means 'Design for Design,' MetaDesign is more than just a design firm. They boast a staff of more than 200 creative professionals who call themselves technologists, planners, designers, and more. Erik Spiekermann, who came into the venture with a background in type design, founded the company in Berlin in 1979. Eleven years later, he was joined by Hans Christian Kruger and Uli Mayer -' together, they transformed their small MetaDesign into Germany's largest design firm.
In 1992, they opened their first U.S. office in San Francisco under the guidance of partners Bill Hill and Terry Irwin. As a company, they have long pursued their collective philosophy of applying a collaborative, hands-on approach to corporate identity and systems design. In addition to their design services, they also offer interactive CD-ROMs and web sites for clients as diverse as Hewlett-Packard and Barclays Global Investors.
While many of MetaDesign's competitors are satisfied chasing trends, MetaDesign prefers to take a more difficult, and consequently riskier, path to design solutions. There is no simple way to encapsulate the MetaDesign 'style' because they have many different cooks working in their very large kitchens. Rather than trying to impose their own style on their various clients, they work to intrinsically tie the design to the existing brand.
For example, MetaDesign's web site for Audi has a general 'look,' but individual pages and pop-up windows offer a variety of styles. To create the site, MetaDesign first delved into the firm's corporate identity, carefully considering the essence behind the Audi name. Taking their cue from the striking design of Audi's new line of cars, the designers fashioned a site that coats bare-bones technical information with streamlined, user-friendly navigability. By using a color palette of flat metallics, compact and crisp animation, and elegantly simple interactivity, the site recalls the very cars that Audi sells. Besides offering many different paths through the site, MetaDesign also presents the car from many angles, in many colors, and in various backgrounds, all to convey to the consumer that while the car has a fixed, futuristic design, its uses can be as varied as Audi's customers.
As Erik Spiekermann said in a recent interview, 'A company has a lot of equity in its brand, and we (at MetaDesign) try to provide the common denominator, the corporate style as it were. If I've seen you before, I'll recognize you whether you're wearing a jogging suit or a black tie. What we try to do is find out its personality, design that, and provide elements so that it'll always be recognized, whatever the circumstance.'
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