How to Live on Your Own Private Island
German Designers Thomas Schostok and Stefan Claudius Talk About Font Design and Life on Cape Arcona
What to do when you really want to escape to a beautiful island but you’re stuck in an ugly city? You create your own island, of course, and then build your business on it so that you never have to leave. Well, that’s what you do if you’re Richard Branson.
Oh, you’re not Richard Branson, you say? No problem there either. You have something even better than money: your imagination. And it’s just such a fertile imagination and some serious design skills that led the besties behind the company Cape Arcona to turn their offices into their happy, creative place.
“Our offices are located in the Ruhr Area in Germany. It’s an ugly but lively place, famous for its coal and steel production in the last century. Economy wise it’s Germany’s Detroit, if you know what we mean, so we relocated our work space in a made-up country called Cape Arcona — a beautiful island between Europe and America.”
When Thomas Schostok, Cape Arcona’s crowned King, and Stefan Claudius, its designated President, founded Cape Arcona in 2002, their initial focus was on promoting the fonts that they’d designed for their self-published Art & Design magazine, BEAST.
So inspired were they, however, by the synergy created by blending their real and fictional worlds that their work soon expanded.
“The hybrid between beautiful Cape Arcona and ugly Ruhr Area is a driving force. We try to make ugliness beautiful, or rather show the cool and charming aspects of ugliness. The imperfect, clumsy attempts of a grill station owner to make a lettering for his business, can be very charming. This is an important inspiration to us. On the other hand we love well-made beautiful typefaces, but beauty can easily look boring. So we try to give these fonts a little bit more of character.”
Over the years, the business has grown from individual typeface design to custom font production, corporate and logo design, and complex text-font families. And 14 years later, it’s still going strong.
“We still have more ideas and projects than time to finish them. We are still hungry. That’s worth a lot.”
But hindsight is always 20/20, and the team does have a few small regrets. They’ve found that script fonts sell best, so they wish they’d done only script fonts from the start. Also, becoming font retailers instead of font designers would have made them rich, they say wistfully.
Still there’s a lot of wisdom that comes from experience, and the team have been around long enough to be able to anticipate likely changes in the industry.
“Trends come and go. We think it’s time for Scotch Roman typefaces (like CA Normal Serif) to become fashionable again. Last time was around 1870. According to all rules of logic, people will become bored of neo-grotesque fonts and look for something more decorated. After clean comes dirty. So grungy designs might have a revival as well.”
When it does, they’ll be ready, and they’d love to design a font that ends up being a popular success.
“It would be a thrill to design a font that in the end will be used by a huge amount of people. It would be really exciting to design a font for Android or iOS or Microsoft.”
Until then, they hope to keep working, growing and prospering and enjoying the beautiful beaches of El Arcona, where you can find them any day after the whistle blows, listening to Elvis or Otis Redding.
Download the fonts at Envato Elements.
