I’m your everyday commercial artist. I’ve been doing creative work for a long time. I could start with the plasticine dinosaurs of my childhood, but while they may not seem relevant, they were actually the prelude to a couple of claymation TV ads I’d make years later.
My first paid gig was in the mid 80s, an animatic for an ad agency handling GTE’s bid to acquire a national phone company. Shortly after that, I created all the graphics and animations for a series of educational software titles for the Apple II. From there, the list only grew: interactive kiosk design using Amiga computers and some of the first membrane touch monitors; countless flying logos built on Quantel Paintbox, Alias, and other wonderfully prehistoric hardware and software.
I studied Architecture and Advertising, but much of my early professional life revolved around animation—digital and otherwise. We even had a proper animation desk with a lightbox and animation disk. It wasn’t a Kem Weber, but it got the job done. Frame-by-frame animation shot on an Arriflex 16S from CineFilms. Practical effects made with sticks, stones, and whatever else we could get our hands on. Digital content evolving in the blink of an eye—much like it still does today.
Those were good times, and over the years the work kept expanding: TV and film, print media, industrial design, video games, TAPS (somehow I ended up designing hundreds of tap handles for just about every beverage company out there), and more recently, board games, where my professional work happily overlaps with my hobbies.
Hermann Hillmann