All eyes on Christian

Christian Pietrzok
Team
Design
Joined
July 2015

More stories about

Christian, why did you become a Designer?
It’s quite funny actually: When I was like 11 or 12 a friend and I started, for whatever reason, to ‘photoshop’ (well, we used a slightly more sophisticated version of paint) ourselves on some magazine covers. A bit later then we started doing a little website for our skate crew we had at that time. I was doing the ‘designs’ for the header banners and whatever else was needed. I also started doing some graphics we put on T-Shirts and Hoodies because of course, we wanted to promote our shitty little website. From there I somehow always kept doing these things for different occasions and always enjoyed them quite a lot. Later then, when I had to figure out what to do in life I was looking for what possibly comes the closest to what I enjoy doing anyway and did an apprenticeship to become a media designer.

Maybe in addition to that, I also like to have some sort of visual or even physical outcome of the work I’m doing. It’s quite satisfying to hold something in your hands you put a lot of thought and effort into. That being said, the physical outcome doesn’t happen too often here at Project A but it’s equally rewarding to know that real people are gonna use and best case even enjoy the website or product you’ve designed.

Why did you join Project A?
A former colleague at Project A, who I did my apprenticeship with, asked me if I’d be interested in a new job opportunity and since my former company was going down slowly, I surely was interested and got hired shortly after. It turned out to be a great decision since it gave me the opportunity to get a look into and gather experience in a whole different field of design.

What was the most exciting project for you so far?
It’s super hard to nail it down to only one, so let me name a few.

Christian’s work for one of Project A’s portfolio companies, LIQID
Christian’s work for one of Project A’s portfolio companies, LIQID

I enjoyed a lot working on the Pets Deli — a Pet Food Brand we were invested in — Branding from the very beginning and everything that came with it like dog and cat food packaging which probably is something me as a designer won’t have the chance to work on very often.

Second would be the rebranding we did for Project A because it was an interesting process all the way from the value creation to translating all the input of our employees into something visual plus all the assets that had to be produced.

Third one would be the complete redesign of the kfzteile24 — an online shop for car parts — webshop. It’s more a love-hate-relationship, but looking back at it, it definitely was an exciting project since the company already had so many users and we had to meet so many different requirements and restrictions.

If I had to pick just one, it would be some smaller project I did once. It was the design for the magazine/blog at LIQID — an asset management company. They wanted something that should remind of a print magazine and feel a bit more classy. I only had one week but I was quite satisfied with the whole process and the result, which doesn’t happen too often.

You finished a design challenge — tell us more about it!
Yeah, in the year 2017 I designed a letter or a number every single day of the year and posted them on Instagram. The whole thing was inspired by the 36 days of type challenge, an open call contest on Instagram that was started by two designers from Barcelona who ask everyone interested once a year to design the letters from A to Z and the numbers from 0 to 9 and upload them to Instagram. Then they pick a few of their favorites every day and repost them. I took that as an inspiration and expanded it to 365 days instead of 36. Why I did that you might ask. I had several reasons, a few being I simply like to play around with these kind of things, I also wanted to explore more styles, techniques, and tools that I usually have no chance of using. And last but not least I just wanted to challenge myself and wanted to see if I can pull something like this through a whole year. And yeah, it worked out, I was happy that I did it, gained quite a lot of traffic and felt super satisfied on December 30th when I finished the last one. I wouldn’t do another 365 days challenge, though.

What is your favorite Project A value?
My favorite Project A Value is Change is Good. Usually I get ‘bored’ quite fast of all different sorts of things, usually that happens when things get predictable or repetitive. I also don’t like a certain type of routines too much and try to switch little things up in my daily life. So Change is Good accommodates that quite well. That being said, I do also like when certain things stay the same. I need different kinds of ‘comfort zones’ around which things can change. I feel that Project A is a good place for that.

What does it take to join the Design team at Project A?
I don’t know if that can be described as a certain profile, because I think we’re open to completely different types of designers. We believe that diverse backgrounds and interests help to keep different perspectives and knowledge exchange within the team alive. A few things we are looking for for example are: a certain visual sensitivity and a good eye for design in general, curiosity, willingness to learn, being able to take a step back and give the user more importance than yourself and ideally a new skill or expertise that we don’t already have in our team.

Thank you for answering our questions, Christian!


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