“A brand needs someone who is certain.”
Sven Hoffmann, Artistic Director
Certain for
Red Bull. Beiersdorf. Mercedes-Benz. La Marzocco. Sir David Chipperfield.
01Manifesto
I don’t make the work. I am there until it is right. Most of what a company produces does not need to exist. The part that does is usually already in the room. It only has to be noticed. So I look. I listen. I begin. Then I say: this one. I know when it is right. I always have. Letting something emerge is also a choice. So is stopping it. What a brand gets from me is certainty about what it is.
02About
Sven Hoffmann has designed, photographed and directed for thirty years. Identities, campaigns, magazines, objects, images. He no longer shows the work. What it left him with is judgment.
03Selected clients
- &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
20259 Hamburg, Germany
05Conversation
For anyone who wants to keep reading. 22 questions, about seven minutes.
What did you see as a child that the others overlooked?
I think I was always interested in what is behind a person. At nine or ten I watched a junior tennis tournament, and after the matches I walked up to the players because I wanted to know them. That has stayed with me. In a foreign country I love a long conversation with a taxi driver. Taxi drivers are a wonderful mirror of a society.
Who first showed you that something can be well or badly made?
My father. He is a professor of physics, and also a very good photographer and draughtsman, with beautiful handwriting. He judged my first drawings. Always with wit and love, but also to teach me something. Proportion, or where things sit on the page. For him, judging is simply part of things. For me too.
What in your home would you never give away, and why exactly that?
My son’s first pair of Vans. And a very small photo book by Daido Moriyama, barely twelve centimetres high, made with Comme des Garçons. He has walked through Tokyo for more than sixty years, at his own pace, in all modesty. He never looked for the one photograph. The process of the work became the process of his life. Then I saw a documentary in which he goes through the pictures after a shoot. He needs a millisecond to say: next. Or: make that one black and white.
What can you not stand when you walk into a room?
When it smells bad. For me that is genuinely awful. And I notice it just as clearly when a room smells very good.
What did fashion teach you that you still use today?
A ten-point system. I judge almost everything by it. A look has ten points. If one piece is very extravagant, eight points are already gone, and the rest has to step back. With brands it is the same. For La Marzocco I made one limited book a year, each about one of their markets. For culture, that one book was the eight or nine points. Anything more in that area would have been wrong. It is always about balance.
Monaco: what do you learn about taste in a place where money is no object?
Money plays a role everywhere. I moved to Monaco straight after studying fashion design, for my first real job. There were three styles, and two of them were almost identical. The first was mine: the people who were there without money. No big labels, nothing showy. Then the middle, the rich, who defined themselves through brands and shot far past the ten-point system. And at the very top, people who looked more or less exactly like me. Restrained, because they had nothing to prove to anyone. Only the middle needed to be noticed. A sure sense of style has nothing to do with money.
How did you get to David Carson?
Through the book The End of Print. I found it in a bookshop in San Francisco and had never heard the name. It was a revolution. I wrote him a lot of emails. Then one day I wrote that I had seen his second book as in-flight entertainment on Korean Air, on every seat. That was not true, of course. That is when he answered. Later I worked with him, and it became a long friendship. Once a mutual friend stayed in his house on the British Virgin Islands. I asked him to steal something for me. He brought back a torn boarding pass. Passenger: David Carson. I had a jeweller turn its letters into a ring.
What was the most important thing David Carson ever said to you?
That the beginning has to be uncensored and free. Every impulse can start a design, and you must not check too quickly whether the idea works. But that belongs to the designer, who tries a lot and makes a lot. That was me then. Now I make the decisions.
Which moment at Red Bull changed you most?
My first meeting with the late founder, Dietrich Mateschitz. It was for his foundation, Wings for Life, which funds research so that people who are paralysed might walk again. Nobody had found a way to show that research. My idea was to go to the people who do it. I photographed the scientists in their laboratories, in black and white, on a Leica. A portrait, a name, a university, and one line: Donate for a Vision. What mattered was that it did not look like Red Bull. It stood on its own. Afterwards Mr Mateschitz told me that if he gave a hundred points, which he never does, I would get a hundred. I learned a great deal from him. He told me when he thought I was wrong, always with dignity and generosity.
Who taught you to say no?
No one person. Experience lets you say no more firmly at the points that matter. What counts is how you say it. I learned that in five years of teaching at Miami Ad School in Hamburg: feedback that is interesting without discouraging anyone. The no is always clear, and it always has to be said. But never the no alone. At the same moment you open a door to the alternative.
What happens in you in the first three seconds when someone shows you work?
First I am glad. Someone is showing me something, and that is always the beginning. Then a basic feeling arrives, and it is almost always right. The rest is checking that first reaction and taking it apart. Very rarely does a second look turn the whole thing in another direction.
How do you recognise that something is almost right, but only almost?
It is usually proportion. Take a poster. The content is right, the design is right, the idea is lovely. But it is still a little unstable, or not quite balanced. Sometimes the type only has to be five points larger, or one element has to move up. A very simple intervention. And then everything is there.
Tell me about a no you said to a client, and the door you opened with it.
For Head Snowboards the task each season was the same: chase the pro riders up some mountain and take pictures. For me that repetition was a clear no. I said so to the CEO, in a large meeting. He understood very quickly. Instead we took the athletes to China, into the factory, and had them design limited boards themselves. We photographed and filmed the trip and made the campaign out of it. Nobody in the industry had done it like that. It began with a no to more of the same.
When were you last wrong?
I am never wrong. No. Here is one. At Red Bull I wanted to make a lifestyle fashion collection, and I had already designed a lot of it. Mr Mateschitz told me I was wrong. There was the athletes’ collection, strictly reserved for the athletes, and now and then a little merchandise. Looking for a middle between the two would have been a mistake. I really was wrong. Many years later a fashion label did come, under another name, AlphaTauri. I still think it weakens the brand.
What is the difference between taste and opinion?
An opinion is something you want. Taste is something you see. An opinion has to be defended. Taste shows in the result: you move one thing, and everyone in the room sees that it is right now. Taste develops, and then you have it. You own it. Nobody can take it away from you.
What does a day look like when you work well?
Get down to business. Not three matcha lattes and seventeen podcasts before anything happens. It is about beginning. The decisions come out of the work, and so does the certainty. I do not think everything through to the end first, and I bring clients in early.
What do you do when you do nothing?
I love doing nothing. Only ever making does not make the results good. In a new city I walk out of the hotel door and go, aimlessly, all day. I look and sit and drink one filter coffee after another. All of it in the trust that enough is happening in the background that I can call on later. Alone, no aim, hands in my pockets.
What have you stopped doing, and what did it give you?
Looking for confirmation in the client’s applause. Sir David Chipperfield taught me that. I once made a film for him about one of his projects, and he told me he had long stopped looking for success only in the result and simply enjoys the process. If your only joy is a convinced client, a creative life becomes very hard. It gave me much more joy in the work.
After thirty years, why do you no longer want to make it yourself?
Every decade of working has its own task. The new generation is simply better at making. They connect the tools better, the classic programs and AI, and they are faster and more accurate. I do not have to be that any more. For the decade ahead of me it is more interesting to use what I have learned, in a position where I can say whether something is right or wrong.
What does a large company need from you that it cannot get inside?
Companies are so busy with their own things that they lose two views: the one from outside, and the one towards the outside. I bring those back, working with the teams that are already there. What they get is someone who is sure of his taste and can put it into words. I say what is right, what is not, and what to do instead.
What should someone say about you after working with you for a year?
That it did not only move the results forward. That we learned together. And that it was really fun.
So what is the job now?
A brand needs someone who is certain.