Mirko Borsche’s studio, from 2007.

Bureau Borsche is the graphic design studio of the German designer Mirko Borsche. German Wikipedia says he founded it in 2007 in Munich, under the name Bureau Mirko Borsche, and that it works in editorial design, book design, posters and websites. The Observer, in a profile by Mark Hooper published in The Guardian’s online edition on 30 September 2019, gives the same year: Borsche launched his own graphic design studio in 2007, and it has operated out of his Munich base ever since.

The same profile traces the route that led to the studio. Borsche spent his youth as a graffiti writer in Munich, and told the paper that “bombing trains and walls” influenced him a lot. He studied graphic design at Kingston University in London and at the University of Applied Sciences in Augsburg. The Observer says he then spent five years as an art director in advertising, for clients including Levi’s, MTV and Mercedes-Benz, before co-founding the style magazine NEON and art directing Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin. German Wikipedia adds that from 2000 to 2013 he designed posters for the Munich record label Gomma.

The shorter name Bureau Borsche is the one used by The Observer in 2019 and on the studio’s own website. Borsche told The Observer in 2019 that he dislikes designers with large egos who impose their own aesthetic on brands, calling it “the worst thing ever”. In the same interview he said that many brands now let the marketing department lead designers, and argued that they need more courage instead.

Munich has also shown the studio’s work back to itself. German Wikipedia lists an exhibition at Die Neue Sammlung in Munich in 2012 with the title “Unplugged. Bureau Mirko Borsche. Design Works!”, and an earlier group show at the Haus der Kunst in 2008. The studio’s own project index lists a visual identity for the Haus der Kunst and an identity for the Villa Stuck museum among its later work in the city.

A newspaper, an opera house and a fashion house: clients, dated.

The studio’s longest-running relationship is with a newspaper. German Wikipedia says Borsche has been creative director of Zeit Magazin since 2007, citing the trade paper Horizont in November 2018, and The Observer wrote in 2019 that he had worked as creative director for Die Zeit since 2007, and the profile gave that role a long passage. He described the design for the paper as classic and “humble”, but with room for unexpected twists in photography and typography, “to provoke people or make them see things from a different angle”.

He gave one example in the 2019 interview: the deliberately rough drawings by his friend Martin Fengel, a photographer rather than an illustrator, which run beside Harald Martenstein’s column. Borsche said Fengel had a sense of humour and a way of telling things “with a few ugly lines”, and that it had worked out well. He also praised the paper’s editors for investing in print, quoting them as saying that the product was their hero.

Culture clients sit alongside the paper. The Observer described the studio’s season guides and posters for the Bavarian State Opera as “acid-meets-classicism”, and the studio’s own project index lists opera seasons from 2010–11 through to 2025–26, as well as work for the Münchner Opernfestspiele. In May 2019, the paper reported, the studio’s art commission for the Venice pavilion at the Biennale spread neon green idents across the city, on flags, plastic bags and more, as if the artwork were a Venice logo; the piece played on the theme of fake news. German Wikipedia records the same Biennale participation in 2019.

Fashion is the third strand. It’s Nice That reported on 1 March 2017 that the “Germany-based studio, founded by Mirko Borsche” had created a new website for the French fashion house Balenciaga, working with the designer Demna Gvasalia, who had joined the house in 2015. The magazine said the site stripped the elements back to a basic grid, with the Balenciaga logo appearing modestly in the top left corner and imagery focused on the products, in a uniform, catalogue-like design that was meant to be “utterly brilliant in its simplicity and superbly user-friendly”. The Observer wrote in 2019 that the studio had created websites and logos for Balenciaga and for Givenchy, and in the same year a new logotype for the relaunch of the style magazine The Face. Borsche told the paper that he had wanted to keep the aesthetic and feeling of the original rather than copy it, since editorial design had moved on. He also named Nike as a favourite client, because, he said, the company trusts the people it works with.

One founder’s name, many clients.

A European design studio’s identity is assembled from a small number of decisions that sit close to the people who run it. The first is the name. Many studios carry the surnames of their founders, joined into a pair or a longer chain; others choose a single short word, a city or a plain noun, so that the name reads as a label rather than a signature. Each route sets a different tone before any work is seen.

The second is publishing. A studio may run its own imprint, edit a journal or produce books about its field, and those printed objects carry its typographic voice into libraries and bookshops. Studio publications often say more about how a practice thinks than its client case studies do.

The third is type. When a studio draws a typeface for a client, the letters can outlast the commission and become the most visible trace of the studio’s hand. Some practices also release fonts under their own name.

Finally, the studio website works as a brand surface in its own right: the grid, the type and the ordering of projects show the house manner directly, with no client brief in between.

A football crest, and a client list that keeps widening.

The studio’s sports work includes a commission is for FC Internazionale Milano. The club announced a new logo on 30 March 2021, saying the task of designing it had been entrusted to the Bureau Borsche team. Inter described the mark as a modern reinterpretation of its historic symbol in a more streamlined and minimalist form: the letters I and M, preserved from Giorgio Muggiani’s original design, framed by the club’s concentric circles, with the colours chosen on 9 March 1908 made more vivid. The club said the initials played on the English expression “I am”, and that the new logo would be used from the 2021–22 season. The studio’s project index lists a visual identity for the club.

The same index shows how wide the client list has become. It names collection graphics for Supreme in 2022, work for The North Face and Birkenstock, issues of the magazines 032c and Numéro Berlin, a visual identity for the Julia Stoschek Foundation, and jersey designs for a Greek football club. These are the studio’s own listings rather than dated press reports.

In 2019 Borsche told The Observer that clients should trust the people they hire, and said that European brands were often stuck in the marketing habits of the 1980s and 1990s, repeating the same things. He described the Zeit design as classic and humble with twists in photography and typography, and It’s Nice That described the 2017 Balenciaga website as a plain grid with a small logo and the products in front.

For a design guide, Bureau Borsche shows how a studio can keep a plain, almost neutral typographic base for a newspaper, an opera house or a fashion house, and then add one unexpected element that makes the reader look twice. Compare Balenciaga, one of the studio’s fashion clients, and HORT, another German studio in this collection. For this guide we use black, newsprint and acid green with a heavy grotesque sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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