My name is Benjamin Hösel. I was born in Klagenfurt – a small but nice city in Carinthia, Austria. I’m the founder and Art Director of Die Agentur Lux, a design agency specializing in branding and design. We develop design solutions and visual identities with a clear massage for companies, people, brands and products – both print and digital.

I don’t have a typical graphic design education, as I never went to university or something like that. I was going to a Higher Technical College (HTL) for Industrial design but I soon realized, that making presentations and doing layouts and the graphic-design part was a lot more fun to me. So I basically trained myself all the skills and I’m still trying to get better at what I do every day!

I would describe our work as clean, typographic, sometimes sassy with a contemporary approach. We are always trying to transport an idea behind the design and to solve a problem. In addition to that we are constantly experimenting with different ideas pushing our „type first“ approach. Graphic Design should transport a message and it should be as simple as possible. In terms of print production we work a lot with exclusive materials and finishings.

Of course we know and admire all the design legends like Massimo Vignelli, Otl Aicher, Willy Fleckhaus, etc. but we really do admire the “new generation“ like Stefan Sagmeister, Mirko Borsche, Felix Pfäffli. In addition to that we also think that independent type foundries like GrilliType, KlimType, Optimo etc. do have a lot of impact on the creative scene. And therefore we really admire them. In my eyes there are so many good designers out there and we are so lucky to have platforms and blogs across the web to promote our work and reach a lot of people worldwide. In our studio we have a standard of design which we always want to push forward.

We are pretty lucky to have amazing clients but whenever you do client-projects there are always some kind of limitations. We are steadily working on self-initiated projects like our Umbruch Magazine. It specializes in the topics of design, fashion and architecture and making the creative process visible. It is always important to have self initiated projects like this, where you don’t have any limitations and room for experimentation. We had worked and collaborated with Ortner and Ortner Architects, Arthur Arbesser, Manfred Bockelmann, Matteo Thun and a lot more in previous issues. We started the project back in 2012 and released our latest issue recently.