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INFO > Biography in Brief |
OLIVER WEISS:
Biography
in Brief
About the Artist
Oliver Weiss is a whimsical
illustrator and designer from Germany who has lived in the United States and
Canada. He works for a great many international clients from
North America, Asia, and Europe.
Oliver's work has been recognized by
American Illustration,
the annual US contest showcasing newest trends and talent in
American art. It has also been included in the
Society of Illustrators'
annual and exhibition in New York,
and in Creative Quarterly magazine. Oliver has recently been interviewed by the
industry's flagship,
3x3 Magazine
for which he was also a judge for the 2011 annual illustration competition.
His work has recently been featured in
Novum – World of Graphic Design
magazine.
Further, Oliver is one of only 100
designers that are regularly getting invited to create official stamp designs
for Germany.
Oliver's
clients include The
Christian Science Monitor, DER SPIEGEL,
DIE ZEIT, The
Writer, Axel Springer, Prospect, Psychologie Heute, Hong Kong Tatler, German
Trade Union, Burda, Euromoney, Deutsche Bank, Tesa, CBS, Expedia,
Nature, Random House, Rowohlt, Campus, Ravensburger, Piper,
Süddeutsche Zeitung, and the
European Union.
Recent
Projects
Oliver designed his first mug design for
Ritzenhoff
in 2011. In 2010, he created a range of
tin packaging product designs for Huber Decorative. Winning the grand prize (10,000 EUR)
in the closed competition for the official
Oktoberfest poster on behalf of the City of Munich
in 2008,
Oliver's design has been featured on a multitude of
merchandising products ranging from the official collector’s item beer stein
to t-shirts and mugs. This tops off a series of competition
awards Oliver has received over time.
Other projects of Oliver's include
jacket
designs and illustrations for book publishers like dtv, Droemer Knaur, Carl Hanser, Random House,
Rowohlt, Piper,
and Campus. Oliver has created the design for
Wer bin ich? ("Who am I?") and
Liebe ("Love"), two Goldmann Verlag nonfiction titles on
philosophy authored by Richard David Precht that rank among the highest selling nonfiction books
within Europe (over 1.2 mill. copies sold, with sales ongoing).
Further books for which Oliver has created
artwork and jacket designs include Gregory David
Roberts' worldwide bestselling novel,
Shantaram, and nonfiction titles from
Tal Ben-Shahar,
Dirk Steffens,
André Fourçans,
Tom Buhrow, and
Anne
Cushman.
Other
recent clients include
Süddeutsche Zeitung, Psychologie Heute, Prospect magazine and The Christian Science Monitor. A
documentary of 2004 included footage of Oliver working on
a DER SPIEGEL cover design that was used for an international exhibition
tour showcasing the cover art of 50 years from Germany's largest news magazine.
From
Journalism to Corporate Design to Multimedia
Oliver is also engaged in
corporate design projects. Clients include publishers, universities, and
conference organizers. He has also been an expert reviewer
for design and multimedia engineering, and has worked on multimedia
ventures (including animation and soundtracks).
In 1999, Oliver launched LEGAmedia,
a self-owned online-only legal magazine that he edited for five years. Following
Oliver's three-month stint in New York City in 2001, LEGAmedia quickly evolved
into one of the world’s largest legal web sites, featuring multilingual articles
from
authors
like former NYC mayor, Ed Koch, Harvard's strategic management guru, Michael
Porter, and hundreds of partners from major international law firms.
In 1996, while working as a freelance
journalist for a variety of magazines, he evolved into one of
the country's first web
site developers, working for large-scale clients
from publishing, and for
major law firms.
Oliver was also contracted by
AOL to edit a
legal online publication.
In 1999, Oliver's web site for
Haarmann
Hemmelrath,
then among the country’s top-five law firms, was awarded the
grand prize (3,500 EUR)
in recognition of what the jury at the German Bar Association
considered to be Germany's best web site for a law firm.
A Long, Stony
Route
Oliver’s career as an artist is somewhat
unique in that he is self-taught in everything he has professionalized in. He
holds a master of science degree (Diplom-Ingenieur) in Information Technology from
Munich's elite University of Technology,
specializing in signal processing and speech analysis.
Oliver supported his university years
by creating
illustrations for some of Germany’s largest daily papers, including weekly
artwork for DIE WELT, and assignments from Süddeutsche Zeitung
and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, as well as hundreds of
special-interest publications from around the world. This is where his
profession as a self-taught illustrator and designer got initiated.
During graduation and after, while still
supporting himself entirely on artwork, Oliver was torn
between making a living as a professional artist and seeking a post-graduate
academic career in the fields of ethology (voice analysis in bonobos, cetaceans and
birds) and phonetics (speech analysis in humans).
To this end, he spent a total of over a
year at
ethologist Konrad Lorenz’s Max Planck Institute for Behavioral
Physiology with human ethologist, Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, as well as at universities in
Germany and France.
Around 1996, with the Deutsche Bank
approaching him for a major illustration assignment, Oliver decided to take the
plunge and settle
for illustration, design and journalism.
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Oliver's
Year 2012
