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Playing With Food

Interview with EIGA design head Henning Otto

by Paul Wheatley | October 20th 2011 | 08:00 pm

From the type of high-quality paper down to the fonts, EIGA’s Eat! Design with Food, Design Calendar 2012 is a page-turning treasure-trove of creations from 54 international designers. We go behind the scenes with Henning Otto, head of the EIGA design studio.

EIGA design head Henning Otto

You are a small company, but you work with some of the biggest brands in the world, from BMW to Adidas.
We call our self an interdisciplinary design office. We’re quite small, we have 8-10 people, mostly graphic designers, but we involve lots of freelancers, including architects, interior designers, photographers, writers and all sorts of digital designers.

How did you come up with the idea for the 2012 calendar?
We’re always trying to find a concept that fits into the Zeitgeist. Last year we had a calendar called Think Green! Design to Save the World, which dealt with sustainability. This year we have a concept called Play! Design for Kids. We are a very trend-oriented design agency and we always check out, for example, design blogs and try to spot micro-trends. We found a lot of typography dealing with food plus design projects based on food, and we came up with the idea of doing something with this – not cooking, but in the way of using food as a material.

Is each page designed by a different designer?
Yes. Designers contribute a piece of work and we make a selection, then we create our own typography for each design. You’ll find the designers’ pieces on the left pages and on the right you’ll find the individually designed typographies that we designed to fit to each piece of work.

Which design stands out for you?
One I really love is the work of Kyle Bean, week 15, April. It’s very original – it’s called ‘What Came First?’, as in the chicken or the egg? He took this special material of eggshells and built a sculpture. Today it’s very trendy to create a graphic design with handmade objects made from paper, made from cardboard, but he went a step further with his eggshells.

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