My name is Matthias. I live with my family near Mannheim in Southern Germany, and also in Berlin. For a living, I run a graphic design agency together with my team to support our customers in the music-, movie-, games- and publishing-industry. For these customers, we create all assets needed for their online-marketing, such as websites, landing pages, banner ad campaigns and HTML newsletters. I founded my agency in 1999 after finishing a typesetter apprenticeship. Our office is located in the Friedrichshain neighborhood of Berlin and now hosts a team of eight designers and programmers.

I really enjoy the agency work: the team is awesome, the projects inspiring and interesting, and the interaction with our longtime-customers is deeply personable and productive.

Nevertheless a few years ago, I missed being creative for myself, painting by hand and working less on the computer. I started taking photos of scenes and locations in my surroundings, which had gradually caught my eye for later use as reference in hand-drawn illustrations.

I'm particularly fascinated and inspired by the contrast and symbiosis of the old and the new within the urban environment. In most of my work you will find these ingredients: metropolitan buildings somewhat worn-out by time, and current urban art like graffiti, tags, and stickers.

The main influence on my illustration technique is the "ligne claire" style of the French/Belgian comic book artists, such as Hergé (The Adventures Of Tintin) and Edgar P. Jacobs (Blake and Mortimer). They feature clear, strong black lines that define the shape and selected details of an object. I draw my lines manually, initially on paper. Since 2016, I use Procreate on an iPad Pro. I use Photoshop to shade, colorize, and finalize the illustrations. I'm further inspired by Japanese manga drawings and how halftone dot patterns add depth and shading to an image, in addition to clear black lines. I'm intrigued by exploded assembly drawings found in instruction manuals or technology-related magazines.

I hope you enjoy taking a look at my work. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to send me an e-mail.

Best,
Matthias

Follow me on Instagram! 🙂