OLIVER WEISS:
Biography in Brief
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About the Artist
Oliver Weiss is a freelance
illustrator and designer from Germany who has lived in the United States and
Canada for several years. He works for a great many international clients from
North America, Asia, and Europe.
His
clients include DER SPIEGEL, DIE ZEIT, The
Writer, Random House, The Christian Science Monitor, LatinFinance, Axel Springer, Prospect Magazine, Hong Kong Tatler, German
Trade Union, Burda, Euromoney, Deutsche Bank, Rowohlt, Tesa, CBS, Expedia,
nature, Ravensburger, Euro RSCG, RWE, IDG, Tecniche nuove, Gabler, Siemens, and the
European Union.
Recent
Projects
Recent projects of Oliver's include
jacket
designs and illustrations for book publishers like Random House, Rowohlt,
Hoffmann und Campe, LangenMüller,
and Campus. Oliver has created the design for
Wer bin ich? ("Who am I?") and
Liebe ("Love"), two Goldmann Verlag's nonfiction titles on philosophy
authored by Richard David Precht which have been among the highest selling nonfiction books
in Europe (over 1.5 mill. copies sold, with sales ongoing).
Other 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, Ephraim Kishon,
André Fourçans,
Tom Buhrow, and
Anne
Cushman.
In 2009, Oliver received an invitation
from the German Ministry of Finance to create official stamp designs for
Germany. 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
recent clients include the British Prospect Magazine and one of
America's most eminent newspapers, The Christian Science Monitor. A
documentary of 2004 included footage of Oliver working on
a DER SPIEGEL cover design which 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 ranging from developing
corporate identity strategies to magazine designs, logo designs, stationery, brochures,
kitchenware and
collateral. Clients include publishers, corporations, universities, and
conference organizers. He also works as a friend of the court
for design and multimedia engineering, and has worked on multimedia
ventures (which include animation and soundtracks) for
clients from Germany, the United States and Asia.
In 1999, Oliver launched his very own
legal magazine, LEGAmedia, an online-only publication
for which he served also as editor-in-chief over five years. Following
Oliver's three-month stint in New York City, LEGAmedia quickly evolved
into one of the world’s largest legal web sites, featuring multilingual
articles and exclusive
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 and as editor for a highly-circulated publication for C.H. Beck, Germany’s largest legal publisher, 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 also published and edited that legal magazine's online edition
for a period of more than two years. He was successively contracted by
AOL to edit a
legal online publication.
His legal web site engineering client
list reads like a
Who's Who among Germany's largest law firms. 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 from the German Bar Association
considered to be Germany's best web site for a law firm.
How it all
Came About
Oliver’s career as
illustrator,
designer and artist is somewhat
unique in that he is self-taught in everything he has professionalized on. He
holds a master’s degree ("Diplom-Ingenieur") in Electrical Engineering and
Information Technology from the University of Technology, Munich,
specializing in signal processing and speech analysis.
Oliver supported his university years
by creating cartoons and
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 cartoons, 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
world-renowned 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 settle
for illustration, design and journalism.
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