Thomas Manss

Thomas Manss (* 1960 in Gütersloh ) is a German graphic designer and art director. In 2002 the British newspaper Independent on Sunday listed him as one of the top ten graphic designers in Great Britain. He lives and works in London and Berlin.

life and work

Manss was born the son of an architect couple. He attended the Evangelisch Stiftische Gymnasium Gütersloh , studied visual communication at the Fachhochschule Würzburg and started his career at Erik Spiekermanns MetaDesign in Berlin, where he a. a. was involved in the development of the control system of the Berlin transport company. From 1985 onwards, at Sedley Place Design , he was in charge of design programs for clients such as Volkswagen , Schering , the Deutsche Bundespost and the Deutsche Bundesbank .

In 1989 he moved to the London agency Pentagram Design and worked with Alan Fletcher on corporate design for Scandinavian Airlines , the Barbican Center and Shakespeare's Globe Theater . He and Fletcher created the guidance system for the London-Stansted Airport , which was newly built by Norman Foster . In 1992 he was appointed associate and was responsible for the development of a new corporate identity for Shilla Hotels in Korea, exhibition design for the British Design Council and a competition entry for the new image of the capital Berlin.

In 1993 Thomas Manss founded his own design office Thomas Manss & Company in London. After three years of teaching at the Potsdam University of Applied Sciences as a guest lecturer for corporate identity, a second office was founded in Berlin in 1996. His clients include the British loudspeaker manufacturer Bowers & Wilkins , Hotel Arts Barcelona , Meoclinic in Berlin, Tate Modern and Tate Britain , The British Museum and the London National Portrait Gallery , the auditing company Deloitte , the furniture manufacturer Vitsœ and the International Design Center Berlin .

His reputation is reflected in numerous publications and awards for work in Germany, Great Britain, Holland and Russia and at the Graphic Design Biennale in Brno. Thomas Manss is a member of the British Art Directors Club D&AD , the Society of Typographic Designers and was appointed a Fellow of the Chartered Society of Designers in 1994 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 1996 .

Manss works for numerous international architects. He created appearances, workbooks and wayfinding systems, etc. a. for Foster + Partners , Nicholas Grimshaw , John McAslan + Partners , Zaha Hadid , Tadao Ando and Hascher Jehle . He also took on the labeling of the permanent exhibition in the Berlin Reichstag and designed a large number of books for Norman and Elena Foster. Thomas Manss & Company received various design awards such as the iF Design Award , an award for the most beautiful German books and a nomination for the 2010 Design Award of the Federal Republic of Germany for the book Foster 40 on the fortieth anniversary of the architecture office .

Publications

• Order & Eccentricity , Die Gestalten Verlag Berlin (2002), ISBN 978-3-931126-81-0
• Thomas Manss & Company , av edition Ludwigsburg (2008), ISBN 978-3-89986-089-4

literature

• translations 02 - Positions on Identity in Design , University of Applied Sciences Mainz (2008), ISBN 978-3-936723-18-2
• New Compendium Corporate Identity and Corporate Design , av edition Ludwigsburg (2008), pp. 22–31, ISBN 978-3-89986-093-1

Web links

• Literature by and about Thomas Manss in the catalog of the German National Library