Mate Steinforth - feature & interview

Right now I'm still enjoying the last day of the 4th of july weekend luckily which was the first weekend I didn't worked after three weeks straight. That already describes my work/life situation in New York pretty much, as well as the one of most other New Yorkers, I guess. Nevertheless I enjoy living and working here a lot.

Compared to Europe I feel that people in the US are more used to working in teams. Hardly anyone gives attitude and everyone seems committed to pushing the project to be as good as possible. Everyone invests a lot of his or her own energy to make things happen. Although, in the US I only worked for PSYOP so far, so I can't really compare.

I miss my friends and family and I miss europe a little as well. You can definitively feel a difference between a european city and New York, even though people here say that New York is a very european city compared to the rest of the US. Which might be true, especially the fact that everyone's walking around. I live closest to work I ever did in any city, so I can walk to work in the morning, but this is particularly lucky.

I start working at 10 in the morning. I used to come in an hour early to read and answer eMails before all the rush starts and everyone gets in. Lately I've been trying to substitute that with going to the gym in the morning. Let's see how long it holds up before it gets boring again. Gym is horribly boring, but I hear it's good for your health, so... In the evening I work until around 7 or 8, then I meet my girlfriend and we go out to have dinner or we cook at home. Usually we watch a movie or read and that's it. After living in Berlin I guess I was spoiled with the nightlife, so here in New York I hardly go out anymore.

I mainly use Photoshop the whole day, really. When I was still freelancing I used to do compositing in After Effects and 3D allround stuff in 3DS MAX and Softimage XSI. Sometimes I still use those software packages, but most of the time it's Photoshop.

I try fitting in some sports from time and I watch a lot of movies. As you can see above, there's not too much spare time left.

In no particular order, I enjoy the work of the directors Chris Cunningham, Alex Rutterford, Niko Tziopanos, Danny Yount, Marc Reisbig, Logan, The Holograms, Maxim Zhestkov, Fluorescent Hill, Dvein, Shilo, Giraffentoast, MK12, Patrick Daughters, c-trl, Pandapanther and so many more. The list goes on.

One of the spots I have worked on and still like most is PSYOP's MTV HD 'Crow' in black and white. Not only is the product in the end very pleasing but also the actual process was really good. From my personal projects I still like the Punk Motherfucker and also it was a lot of fun doing that clip.

That would have to be the classics - PSYOP's Bombay Sapphire Spot. MK12's Macho Box. I guess the things I saw when I started being interested in Motion Design, about 6 years ago, influenced me most.

A movie I watched recently I really liked was Tekkon Kinkreet. In the same genre I enjoyed Paprika, Princess Mononoke and of course Ghost in the Shell and Akira. Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. Although I'm not a real big Anime Fan, I also like the Animatrix and that stuff. Waking Life is really good! I just rewatched Ratatouille - I guess my favourite Pixar Movie so far. Sticking with Design, I actually enjoyed Helvetica. I like Documentaries, especially biographies. Grizzly Man is a very interesting one. One of my favourite TV Show is definitely The Office. I bought the collector's Edition DVD Set of the british version. One of the very few fanboy items I have. I also really like the US NBC Version and the german Stromberg. I hope they'll do another season! Also from Ricky Gervais and also pretty hillarious is Extras, but I think the first Season is way better then the 2nd. Same goes for Heroes. Well, and the list goes on and on. So much good stuff to watch.

It's an interesting question. I myself wouldn't have described my work as typically german. When I spoke to some of the founders of PSYOP, they pretty much pinned it down as 'german'. Initially I kind of refused that definition but now I think I understand what they mean. If you look at the prominent design styles which come from different countries, you can kind of identify a current in each of them. Brazilian Design is colourful and has lush shapes. French Design is kind of 80s, electro. Russian and east european design uses mute, matte colours. All of which are of course generalizations and cliches, but as it always seems to be the case with cliches, hold some truth. Like swiss designer's all use Helvetica and Grids. So now german design is very clean, precise, maybe a little sterile and all in all a bit 'techno'. I guess you could see those adjectives in some of my work.

Europeans think, Americans do.
That's basically what it comes down to. Watching how the design process in the different countries is approached, it just seems very obvious that the strategy here is to produce a lot of work and then collect the best ideas out of this pile. In Germany, some people will think for days and days about concepts and then do just one design. This is obviously a generalization again, but this is how I feel the processes differ. Which doesn't mean one is better then the other. Both have their good and bad parts. Maybe in America designers should step away from the computer or even the sketchbook at the beginning and think about concepts a little more. And maybe german or european designers should not get to attached to their ideas and dare to throw away everything they did so far and just explore a new route.

I stopped being active in the demoscene a long time ago. About 10 years ago I would say. But as everyone meets twice I still have some friends from those times and from time to time I stumble upon an old contact from the demoscene which is always a lot of fun. I think technological the demoscene and game development is the future. The most intereseting and avantgarde methods and concepts are born in this area right now. I feel conceptually or content wise a lot of the stuff is not so originally as it once was.

I used to listen to drum and bass and electronic music. This is still the music I enjoy most to go to a club and dance. I worked a lot with Michael Fakesch, who was one part of Funkstörung, who were one of the bestknown and in my opionion just best groups for that style of music. So I guess I did music videos for one of my favourite artist. I'd love to do a music video for Santogold. I really like the music. PSYOP is just working on a music video involving this artist. I was not working on that project though. The very highest honour, so to say the accolade, would obviously be a video for Bjork. Seeing though how hard the guys from UV Phactory and Encyclopedia Pictura worked on 'Wanderlust', I don't know if I could take it.

Well, definitely. The flyer culture of the early 90s influenced me a lot. All of my friends had their teen bedroom decorated the walls with flyers with neon coloured smileys and rainbows.

My job at PSYOP is Designer and Director. Depending on the project I work either on the Design or as well on the Direction.

...one that has an unlimited budget, is open to any idea and doesn't want changes at all. Also, the ideal client doesn't have...

...usually sooner then you'd like them to be, but on the other hand often time is a good motivation as well.

In the dotcomboom around 1999, I used to work in web design. Like everybody. I was doing mainly flashdesign, again, as everybody, which I enjoyed quite a bit. In that time the internet connection of most people still was a 56k modem and the computers were slow, so that you were very limited in the resources you could use in a website. When I started focussing on video two years later, I was relieved but the fact that I could use as many colours as I want, images as big as I wanted, and everything was playing back in realtime. Truly WYSIWYG. Now the game has changed and a lot of websites are more like a DVD - Animations stitched together with some user input. This concept allows for lush visuals, but is not very pleasing in terms of interface design. Soon best of both worlds will come together and that's when it's gonna be very interesting also for Animation to look at web design, if it is not already.

I was always looking for a content management system to be able to change stuff quickly. I used to have a custom built content management system (with PHP coding done by Michael Seemann) which worked very well but was not easily extendable. I wanted to relaunch my website and was looking for an easy to use yet flexible and extendable content management system. I looked at stuff like Typo3 and Mambo, which were both absolute overkill. I wanted the content to be pretty much just a list of stuff, so I though a blog system would be good. WordPress looked just more inviting then Typepad so I went with it. Also there were so many plugins that it seemed indefinitely expandable. The other obivous advantage of going with the market leader is that if you ever want to migrate to another platform, there will be a lot of exporters and importers for your database. Starting developing the site with WordPress turned out to be a lot more difficult then I thought, though. Because I always felt I was already half way through the process I didn'd consider switching to yet another system. When I was actually already done with pretty much the whole site I discovered index hibit (http://www.indexhibit.org). That system actually would have done pretty much everything I wanted with a lot less effort. But now that I have WordPress running I'm really happy with it and I feel future proof and I can extend it to whatever I want, so it's all good.

1. google everything
2. firefox
3. flash video
and the next big thing will probably be situated information eg mobile internet.

That would be FFFFOUND, but as everyone is looking there for inspiration and all the references for all the pitches in the last year looked like a straight FFFFOUND screenshot I kind of stopped looking there too much. I use RSS feeds for everything, so if a site doesn't have a feed, probably I won't go there too often. You can just look at my feeds via my bloglines blogroll.

I don't look at websites for their design so much. I like clean designed websites where it's obvious what is the content right away. So I don't remember any websites which particularly impressed me, which is a good thing, because it means that webdesign becomes easier to use. Fortunately the big flash intro is a thing of the past. You can look at my bookmarks over at my delicious page http://del.icio.us/mate_sl

Although I hope so, I guess that's not the case. The nickname goes back to when I was going to school. In the art class we were given the assignment to draw our name. My name at that time was the classical 'Matze' for Mathias. Halfway through drawing the letters I realized that there was not enough space on the sheet of paper to fit all five letters. I could have gone with either Matz or Mate, so I chose the latter, and that stuck.

I really enjoyed this interview, very good questions! Thanks a lot for the opportunity to share some of my thoughs and for featuring my work. All the best for spyline and all your efforts!