In Berlin, freedom has its own lane

Feeling that your mind can’t create takes you straight to disappointment, to a lack of drive, to fear. To that paralysis.

I was in the middle of writing and designing a book, with a few decisions already made: I didn’t want it to be a conventional piece. I wanted a design that would blow your mind, something bold, something that would mess up your hair visually the moment you held it, because that was exactly what I wanted the message to stir in you too. Love at first sight, and inspiration once you read it. The urge to get up and make something after stumbling onto it.

With all that in mind, I needed to go back to Berlin, a year after it first messed up my hair. Walking it, looking at it, listening to it and smelling it opens up an appetite for making things that I’ve managed to find in very few places. The first time, it gave me the push for Songs That Gong, my poster project. This time I went looking for the same thing for the book.

I landed without a word of German, and my expectations of getting out of the airport without friction were as low as my chances of pronouncing Ausgang without it sounding like a sneeze.

After half an hour of sleep all night, I got off the plane and started the walk to baggage claim. I found myself moving with no hesitation at all, at ease. When I looked up, I realized why: the airport was signposted so that anyone, from anywhere, could understand it. Walls and floors put to work, red warning you, green inviting you to keep going. Someone had thought about me before I even arrived.

Once I was walking around the city, I noticed that the same care had made it onto the street. I was on the sidewalk and bikes were brushing past me, but the spaces were marked so we could all share them: the bike lane drawn with yellow lines on the ground, painted footprints where those of us on foot had to step into the street for a bit.

I turned all the way around in the middle of the street. Everything was organized and communicated. Concrete messages, clear rules, every message reaching its destination. Respect for other people, whether you’re in a car, on a bike or on a train, whether you’re a tourist or a local.

It feels like people respect that order because they also like feeling respected. Walking through a place without fully understanding the language, but knowing you’re decoding it right, makes you feel at home without being there. When doubt doesn’t creep in with every step, something has been done well. Like a product that works: it doesn’t have to be out of this world, it just has to be frictionless.

But if Berlin were only order, it would be a giant airport. What makes it something else is what happens inside that order. It’s a city that dared to dare, and you can see it in the design: it’s on the surface, on the ground, on the walls and on people’s skin, people who are whoever they want to be. Of every age.

Design Week was already over when I arrived, just like last year, when I couldn’t make it either. But the poster was still there. Just seeing it made me wish I’d gone. The event had ended and the design was still speaking. Like upcycled, circular fashion: you wear it and feel like you were there.

Iconic places, there are thousands. Time for all of them? Not even close. But I made it to the Gropius Bau shop, and this time that was enough. The books said what they needed to say, with no limits on color, ink or layout. The objects looked like they came out of people’s dreams. Nothing was asking itself whether it fit the standards of what’s usually sold in shops like that.

And the whole city was like that: bars with sand floors, bookstores on several levels, workshops for making graphic pieces out of magazine cutouts. I’m officially in love.

We learn how to make correct design when we study, and it’s valuable: the message gets across. But sometimes, day to day, we focus so much on being understood that we lose the extra, the thing that takes design from correct to superlative. Berlin has it: communication excellence, plus that extra layer that sparks a little madness.

It reminded me of my Songs That Gong posters: an artistic mess with an invisible order underneath. Berlin works the same way. Expression is everywhere, but there’s no chaos, because everything has its place. And precisely because no one has to wonder where to walk, everyone dares to do things their own way. In Berlin, freedom has its own lane.

What I brought back: creativity doesn’t need limits, it needs room. The ceiling doesn’t come from outside; we set it from within. Creativity also needs to be understood, and expressive lines can live alongside the most functional order, just like bikes alongside the people walking: a place for each, side by side.

This kind of design feels like me, because it’s the kind I want to make: clear communication, but from a place where my voice comes through, so you can receive it, feel it and catch it too. What I have to give isn’t just a graphic piece. It’s the way it’s told, with a message that comes from my gut. Berlin does that to me.

If you’re stuck in that paralysis from the beginning, you don’t need to get on a plane. Try two things. Pick one part of your process that always makes you hesitate and give it a fixed lane, a simple rule you don’t have to decide again. And next time you go for a walk, look at your city as if you didn’t speak the language: what guides you, what stops you, where there’s room for expression. Once you stop hesitating, the energy to let go everywhere else shows up.

If I could explain Berlin to you, I’d need a lot of space. How do you explain a city where everything around you works on you, seeps into your mood, your mind, your skin? Those of us who go hunting for visual and sensory stimuli, and never manage to catch them all, always want to go back.

J.