Two designers, one studio name.

Vier5 is the design office of Marco Fiedler and Achim Reichert, a pair of German designers who set up their studio in Paris. It’s Nice That, in a feature by Jynann Ong published on 11 September 2020, says both founders grew up in south Germany and came to graphic design through magazines and the visual culture around them, with the music channel MTV as a major influence; Fiedler told the magazine it had “brought the whole world into your room”. The same article says Vier5 was “eventually birthed” in 2002. Reichert’s biography on the website of the Alliance Graphique Internationale gives 1999 as the year he co-founded the office.

Both studied at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach. In an interview with Eugen El published by the school, the pair said the HfG of their time suited an open, interdisciplinary way of working, named teachers including Friedrich Friedl in typography and Dieter Lincke in drawing, illustration and book design, and recalled a 1997 excursion to documenta 10 in Kassel. Asked how they moved from study to work, they said they “went to Paris at some point, sat down and started to work”.

The studio states its aim in one sentence. It’s Nice That quotes the Vier5 website: the work “aims to prevent any visual empty phrases and to replace them with individual, creative statements, which were developed especially for the used medium and client.” The HfG page describes the office as designing communication and new fonts, and the AGI biography says the studio often used typefaces from its own typographic production or drawn for a single project. It’s Nice That sums up the approach in the studio’s own words as doing things “as simple as possible”.

The Neo2 magazine of Madrid already described Vier5 in December 2008 as a German design studio based in Paris, run by Fiedler and Reichert.

Posters for an art centre, then signs for documenta.

An early identity commission came from an art centre south of Paris. The AGI project page dates the work for the Centre d’art contemporain de Brétigny to 2003 and names its artistic director Pierre Bal-Blanc as the client. The studio’s text there says Bal-Blanc ordered posters, other communication material and signage “with the same mindset” as he invited artists to make work for the centre; Vier5 chose not to use images and to respond to each artist through typography, colour, composition and printing technique, and the posters were mailed so that each recipient received a piece of work at home.

Documenta came next. The HfG Offenbach page lists a documenta 12 guiding system in Kassel in 2007, covering signs, container inscriptions, ceramics, bottle caps and symbols. It’s Nice That says the studio has worked on documenta twice, first creating the wayfinding system in Kassel and later the exhibition identity work in Athens.

The second time was documenta 14. Eye on Design, in an article by Madeleine Morley published on 14 June 2017, reported that artistic director Adam Szymczyk invited four studios — Vier5, Ludovic Balland, Laurenz Brunner & Julia Born, and Mevis & van Deursen — to share the communications, with no overarching identity, no logo, no typographic guidelines and no shared colour palette. Each studio took on particular media, and every studio made posters. Vier5’s part was the signage in Athens: red-and-white placards that blend in with other street signs, rooted in the working title “Learning from Athens” and made to look like hand-drawn street signs.

It’s Nice That added details in 2020. The studio planned for some signs to be taken during the exhibition, including a set of marble bricks used as labels for the artworks, and Fiedler said people still wrote to say they had stolen a brick and found another use for it. Reichert described documenta as a chance to treat graphic design as a free form of art that can “take an active social position”.

A studio name on posters, a magazine and clothes.

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.

Magazine, label, shop and later work.

The name also runs beyond client work. The HfG Offenbach page says Fiedler and Reichert have designed fashion collections under the label VIER5 since 2007 and publish the fashion magazine Fairy Tale. Reichert’s AGI biography says one idea behind the magazine was to research and publish knowledge about how to succeed in a creative field, through interviews with the studio’s circle and with artists.

Neo2 reported on 9 December 2008 that the studio had opened an online shop, Vier5 Warehouse. The article listed acrylic jewellery, posters, photographs, bags, notebooks, the Fairy Tale magazine and home goods, along with T-shirts and sweatshirts printed with the Vier5 rabbit, which the writer described as the studio’s logo.

Cultural clients made up much of the later list. In the HfG interview the pair named the Johann Jacobs Museum in Zurich, a book for Museion in Bolzano, a catalogue for mumok in Vienna and an exhibition in Suzhou, alongside documenta 14. It’s Nice That showed 2020 posters and silkscreened textile flags for exhibitions at the Beeler Gallery in Columbus, Ohio, under the artistic direction of Jo-ey Tang.

The partnership changed in 2020. Reichert’s AGI biography says that since leaving Vier5 that year he has concentrated on drawing in small and large formats, a practice that also feeds his commissioned work, and that he teaches and researches as an associate professor in the arts and philosophy department of Paris 8 University.

For a design guide, Vier5 shows a studio identity carried less by a logo than by a habit: new letters and new colour for each client, and work that sits in the street, on a shelf or on a T-shirt under the same name. Compare Mevis & Van Deursen, which shared the documenta 14 commission, and Lamm & Kirch, another German-founded studio in this collection. For this guide we use signal red, placard white and marker black with a grotesque sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Vier5’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.