Florian Lamm and Jakob Kirch, with an ampersand.

Lamm & Kirch is a graphic design studio named after its two founders, Florian Lamm and Jakob Kirch. It’s Nice That named both men as the studio’s founders in an article by Bryony Stone published on 22 June 2017, and described the studio as Leipzig-based, with a practice that ran to books, visual identities and exhibitions as well as posters. The name is simply the two surnames joined by an ampersand.

The studio dates its own start to a shared education. Its website says the studio was founded in 2012, after several years of collaboration within and outside the founders’ studies at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig, the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst. The biography of Florian Lamm on the website of the Alliance Graphique Internationale lists his time at Lamm & Kirch from 2010.

It’s Nice That had already written about the studio more than two years before that interview. In an article by Billie Muraben published on 12 March 2015, the magazine described Lamm & Kirch as a graphic design studio based in Leipzig, working mostly with printed matter. It said the practice also covered books, flyers, identities and periodicals, and that the studio taught, lectured and contributed to publications across Europe. It named three clients from the cultural and educational field: Leipzig’s Academy of Visual Arts, the Bauhaus Foundation and the Vilnius Academy of Arts.

The studio describes the founding idea in terms of conversation. Its website says the basis of the practice was, and still is, “the principle of a dialogue”, with design as the result of an exchange between the partners and with everyone else involved in a project. It says the work is characterised by the idea of working together rather than working “for” someone. A course page of the Berlin University of the Arts for the summer semester of 2023 uses the same phrase, describing Florian Lamm and Jakob Kirch’s idea of working as working “with” instead of “for” somebody.

Detail, order and division: the studio’s own account.

The clearest statement of how the two founders think about form appeared in the 2017 It’s Nice That article. They told the magazine that the major part of their design arises from attention to detail, and that a design starts to function only through “a cautious but precise handling of every possible detail in the elaboration”. Their work, they said, always needs a certain amount of time, an amount of attention in which details can be recognised and a solution worked out with precision.

In the same interview they set out a more general idea. “The form of the product is always a direct consequence of the formal structure of the given material,” they said. Design, in their account, means first making a plan and so keeping order, and that order results from dividing the content into units. “Seen in this way, design is always a divided process,” they continued; the designed form is the result of choosing a particular division, and only through that division do the connections within the content become visible. From those connections, they said, a larger image forms out of constellations that had been invisible before.

Asked for a recent favourite project, the founders picked a book. They told It’s Nice That that they had designed and printed a book with many different spot colours for the Cologne-based artist Rozbeh Asmani. For current interests, they named Henri Matisse and the artistic work of the Swiss designer and artist Karl Gerstner, while saying that what fascinated them was always changing.

The studio’s own description of its process follows the same line. Its website says it takes a holistic approach, from the first preliminary discussions about an assignment through consultation, tendering and graphic design to the supervision of final production and documentation, and that it values direct contact with everyone involved. It describes itself as a mediator between disciplines, and says that, depending on the task, colleagues from other fields join the core office on a project basis.

Surnames on the door, books on the shelf.

Across the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium and Switzerland, a large share of graphic design practices carry the names of the people who run them. A studio called after its founders signals that the work is authored: the client is hiring a way of thinking as much as a production service, and the name on the door stays the same whether the job is a poster, a typeface or a thick exhibition catalogue.

That authorship rarely stops at client work. Many of these practices teach, at art academies and design schools, or run workshops and summer programmes, and the classroom becomes a place where their methods are tested and passed on. Teaching also shapes how a studio talks about itself: as a set of questions and procedures rather than a house style.

Books and exhibitions are the other recurring surface. For a studio working mostly for museums, publishers and cultural institutions, a printed book is both the commission and the portfolio, and a shelf of catalogues says more about the practice than a logo could. Exhibitions of design work, talks and published interviews then carry that identity beyond the people who commissioned it.

Leipzig and Berlin, cultural clients and a long project list.

The studio later split its base between two cities. Its website says that since 2017 it has had studios in Berlin and Leipzig, with a structure designed for decentralised digital work, so that the studio can grow and shrink at the level of individual projects. It adds that both studios are deliberately placed within a larger alliance of other designers and studios. The Berlin University of the Arts course page of 2023 also describes Lamm & Kirch as a Berlin and Leipzig based studio, focusing on books, visual identities and exhibitions in the broad field of the cultural sector.

The studio’s website lists client work for museums, publishers, theatres and art institutions. The list includes corporate design, website, magazine and posters for the Heidelberger Kunstverein from 2012 to 2022; corporate design, posters and a website for Schauspiel Stuttgart from 2012 to 2018; corporate design, a website, a periodical and posters for Urbane Künste Ruhr from 2018 to 2024; and corporate design, a website and posters for the EPFL Pavilions from 2020 to 2024. Book work listed there includes the series Analyse and Excess for Spector Books from 2016 to 2022 and a book for the Schweizer Grand Prix Design from 2018 to 2020.

The recent list includes photobooks. The studio’s website credits it with books for the photographers Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler in 2020 and 2022, and with two books for Ulrich Wüst: Stadtbilder/Cityscapes (1979–1985) in 2021 and Wandern in Geschichte / Wanderings about History in 2023. The Alliance Graphique Internationale project page for the second title, dated 2022, describes it as a book for the photographer on the occasion of his exhibition opening in Busan, South Korea, with the ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen as client.

Teaching is part of the practice. It’s Nice That noted in 2015 that the studio taught and lectured across Europe, and the studio’s website says it has taught at various universities, mostly on a semester basis.

For a design guide, Lamm & Kirch shows how a studio can make its identity out of method rather than a mark: two names, a principle of dialogue, and a long list of printed work for cultural clients. Compare Vier5 and Irma Boom Office, two other European studios in this collection. For this guide we use red, yellow, blue and black with a grotesque sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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