cool & credible. the work is to get there.
sven hoffmann, creative director
selected clients
Red Bull. Beiersdorf. Mercedes-Benz.
La Marzocco. Sir David Chipperfield.
01house rules
- black coffee.
- cool without credible is a costume.
- credible without cool is a brochure.
- look longer than feels polite.
- sort before you build.
- the smallest thing can change the most.
- work with the people who are already there.
- never say no without a comma.
- it’s cheaper to be wrong early.
- have a good time.
02about
facts
- thirty years in.
- creative director, red bull.
- creative director, la marzocco.
- used to teach.
- gets paid for knowing.
- hamburg.
habits
- inspiration: tokyo.
- conversations, not presentations.
- always sex appeal, never sexy.
- style is experience, then courage.
- generous. always generous.
03clients
- &ever
- 25hours Hotels
- Accademia del Caffè Espresso
- Athletik Docks
- Beiersdorf
- Blonde / Pulse Publishing
- Blue
- Espresso Specialists
- Fielmann
- foodspring
- Fugazi
- Gloom
- Gorilla Energy
- Head Snowboards
- Head Sportswear
- Heidelberg Congress
- IRCAN Cancer Institute Nice
- Iris von Arnim
- Klotz Cables
- Kuffler
- La Marzocco
- Marriott Hotels
- Matador Lodges
- Mercedes-Benz
- Motto Hotel Vienna
- Nike
- Officine Fratelli Bambi
- OhJulia
- Porsche
- Red Bull
- Riddle & Code
- rRebel Coffee Works
- Schöpf
- ScienceMagic
- Sea Me
- Sir David Chipperfield
- Stirmarket
- TTT Sportswear
- Universo
04contact
it all starts with a conversation, so this is my actual number.
20259 Hamburg, Germany
05conversation
for anyone who wants to keep reading. 22 questions, 1,682 words, about seven minutes.
what were you like as a kid?
nosy. i was nine or ten, watching a junior tennis tournament, and when the matches were over i just walked up to the players. didn’t want an autograph, i wanted to know who they were. probably a bit annoying. and i never grew out of it. put me in a taxi in a foreign country and i’m talking to the driver before we’ve left the airport. taxi drivers know everything about a place. best mirror there is.
who taught you to look?
my dad. he’s a physics professor, so you wouldn’t think so, but he’s also a very good photographer, he draws, he’s got this beautiful handwriting. he looked at my first drawings and he judged them. properly. he was funny about it, and kind, but he wanted me to learn something. proportion. where a thing sits on the page. for him judging is just part of looking. same for me, i guess.
what’s the one thing you’d never give away?
my son’s first pair of vans. and a tiny photo book by daido moriyama, maybe twelve centimetres high, he made it in collaboration with comme des garçons. the guy’s been walking through tokyo for over sixty years. his own pace, no fuss. and he just snaps. all day, hundreds of pictures, nothing precious about it. the precise part comes after. there’s this documentary where he goes through the pictures after a shoot, and it takes him a millisecond. next. next. that one, black and white. because it’s never about the one photograph. it’s the process, and then a collection that gives you a certain mood. i could watch that all day.
what’s the first thing you notice in a room?
the smell. if it smells bad, i’m out.
what did fashion teach you?
a ten-point system. i use it for pretty much everything. a look has ten points. so if you’re wearing one loud piece, that’s eight points gone, and everything else has to shut up. brands work the same way. at la marzocco i made one limited book a year, each one about one of their markets. culture-wise, that one book was eight or nine points. anything more would’ve been too much. it’s always balance.
monaco. what does that much money teach you about taste?
money matters everywhere, let’s not pretend. i moved there right after fashion school, first real job. and there were three styles, and the funny thing is, two of them looked almost the same. the first one was mine: the people who were there without money. no big labels, nothing loud. then the middle. the new rich. head to toe in brands, way past ten points, more like forty. and then the very top, the ultra-rich, and those people looked a lot like me. quiet. they had nothing to prove. only the middle needed you to notice. so no, style’s got nothing to do with money. i found that very comforting.
how did you end up with david carson?
through a book. the end of print. i found it in a bookshop in san francisco, never heard of him. and it blew my head off. so i wrote him emails. a lot of emails. nothing. then one day i wrote that i’d just seen his second book as in-flight entertainment on korean air. on every seat. complete lie, obviously. that’s the one he answered. later i worked with him, and it turned into a long friendship. once a friend of ours stayed at his house on the british virgin islands, and i said, steal something for me. he came back with a torn boarding pass. passenger: david carson. i had a jeweller turn the letters into a ring.
what’s the best thing he ever told you?
that the beginning has to be free. uncensored. anything can start a design, and you shouldn’t check too fast if the idea’s any good. i love that. but it’s advice for the one who makes, who tries a hundred things. that was me back then. now i’m the one who has to pick.
what’s the red bull moment you still think about?
my first meeting with dietrich mateschitz, the founder. it was for his foundation, wings for life. they fund research so that people who are paralysed might walk again. huge thing, and nobody knew how to show it. i mean, how do you even show research? so my idea was, go to the people who do it. i photographed the scientists in their labs. black and white, on a leica. a face, a name, a university, and one line: donate for a vision. and the important part: it didn’t look like red bull. at all. it stood on its own. afterwards he said to me, if i ever gave a hundred points, which i don’t, you’d get a hundred. i learned so much from that man. when he thought i was wrong, he told me. always with dignity. always generous.
who taught you to say no?
nobody, really. you get older, you get clearer about where it matters. but how you say it, that i learned teaching. five years at miami ad school in hamburg. you’ve got to give feedback that’s interesting and doesn’t crush anybody. the no has to be clear, and it has to be said. but never just the no. you say no, and in the same breath you open a door. that’s the comma.
someone shows you their work. what happens in the first three seconds?
first i’m happy. really. somebody’s showing me something, that’s always how it starts. then there’s a gut feeling, and it’s almost always right. everything after that is me checking the gut feeling. taking it apart. very, very rarely a second look turns the whole thing around. but it happens, so i look twice.
how do you know when something’s almost there?
it’s nearly always proportion. take a poster. content’s right, design’s right, lovely idea. and still it wobbles a bit. something’s not sitting. and then it’s one thing. you move one element up, and that’s it. suddenly it’s all there.
tell me about a no.
head snowboards. every season the brief was the same: chase the pro riders up some mountain, take pictures. and for me that was a clear no. same thing again? no. i said that to the ceo, in a big meeting, which you probably shouldn’t do. he got it very fast, to be fair. so instead we took the athletes to china, into the factory, and let them design their own limited boards. we shot the whole trip, photos, film, and that was the campaign. nobody in the industry had done it like that. and it all started with a no to more of the same.
when were you last wrong?
i’m never wrong. no, wait. here’s one. at red bull i wanted to do a lifestyle fashion collection, and i’d already designed a lot of it. and mr mateschitz said, you’re wrong. there’s the athletes’ collection, strictly for the athletes, and now and then a bit of merchandise. something in the middle would be a mistake. and i really was wrong. many years later a fashion label did come, under another name, alphatauri. i still think it weakens the brand.
what’s the difference between taste and an opinion?
an opinion is something you want. taste is something you see. an opinion you have to defend. taste you don’t, because it shows. you move one thing, and everybody in the room sees it. now it’s right. nobody has to be convinced. and taste grows. it takes years, and then you have it. you own it. nobody can take it away from you.
what does a good working day look like?
you start. that’s it. not three matcha lattes and seventeen podcasts before anything happens. just begin. the decisions come out of the work, and the certainty too. i don’t think it all through to the end first. and i get the client in early, while it’s still ugly.
and when you do nothing?
i love doing nothing. i’m very good at it. if all you do is make, the work doesn’t get better. new city, i walk out of the hotel and go. no plan, all day. i look, i sit, i drink one filter coffee after another. and i trust that something’s happening in the background that i can use later. alone, no aim, hands in my pockets.
what did you stop doing?
looking for the client’s applause. sir david chipperfield taught me that. i made a film for him once, about one of his projects, and he told me he stopped looking for success in the result a long time ago. he just enjoys the process. and he’s right. if your only joy is a convinced client, a creative life gets very hard. since then the work’s a lot more fun.
what’s different after thirty years?
every decade has its own job. and the new generation is better at making. they are. they connect the tools better, the old software, ai, all of it, and they’re faster and more precise. i don’t have to be the fastest anymore, thank god. for the next decade it’s more interesting to use what i’ve learned. to stand next to the work and say, this one. or, not yet.
what does a big company get from you that it can’t get in-house?
big companies are so busy with themselves, they lose two views. how they look from outside, and what’s going on out there. i bring those back. and i do it with the teams that are already there, i love that part. what they get is somebody who’s sure of his taste and can put it into words. this works. this doesn’t yet. try this.
what should someone say after a year with you?
that the work got better, sure. but also that we learned something together. and that it was fun. really fun.
so what’s the job now?
to make a brand, or a company, cool & credible.