At the beginning of the winter semester 2023/24, designer Anna Lena von Helldorff has taken over the professorship for typography in the book design/graphic design course at the HGB Leipzig. The professorship was last held by graphic designer Anja Kaiser. With Anna Lena von Helldorff, the HGB gains an internationally renowned position in contemporary graphic design, who operates at the interface between design, artistic practice and editorial production, as well as an experienced teaching personality.
Anna Lena von Helldorffs design practice encompasses various forms and formats of collaboration, incorporating initiative, conception, and planning equally with drafting, design, and implementation in an expanded understanding of visual and contextual narrative. She acts as a designer at the intersections between text and space, Öffentlichkeit and Veröffentlichung, infrastructure and presettings, installation and exhibition, temporary and long-term settings, and above all between signs and language. In doing so, she understands signs as social, societal, and aesthetic expressions. The observation and study of the interstices and relationships between idea and meaning, appearance and function, image and text, sign and language are as much in focus as the intensive examination of questions about the practical and editorial connection between form and content. Anna Lena von Helldorff understands design and explicitly the discipline of typography as a method in the sense of interpretation - as stepping in between, standing up for something - making the text, the statement, the object explicit and readable, making it public and negotiating it publicly.
[ The following always applies: "What do you see? What do you think? What do you do with it?
(And so on indefinitely) "* ]
*Jaques Rancière in "Der unwissende Lehrmeister".