Chris Campe is a designer and writer in Hamburg. Her medium is language and its visual form.
Chris develops ideas with letterforms and works at the intersection of text and image, art, and design. Her clients are publishers, agencies and companies and she also designs stamps for the German Federal Ministry of Finance. Recently, her protest signs against fascists got a lot of attention and praise.
Chris is the author of six books, three of them about lettering and type. She teaches at several art schools and gives talks internationally. Because she enjoys making connections and bringing people together, she co-founded the Berlin Letters Festival and organizes the Typostammtisch Hamburg.
Say Something!
For the last ten years Chris specialised in lettering. But even though she works with text and draws letters every day, until very recently, she didn’t actually say anything.
In this talk Chris will trace her transition from a designer who draws what her clients ask her to draw, to an artist who write her own texts and initiates her own projects.
She’ll consider why it is so hard for some of us to say anything at all, what her grandma’s reaction to her coming out has to do with it, and what finally got her to speak up.