EDITORIAL & INFORMATION SYSTEM

Client: Humboldt Forum
Editorial design / Cultural communication
Focus: Information design · Editorial systems · Visual identity · Content hierarchy · Design systems

Creating an editorial and communication system capable of organizing the diverse content of one of Germany’s largest cultural institutions.

Role and Responsibilities

At Scholz & Friends, I worked on the visual and editorial development of communication for the Humboldt Forum. My responsibilities included translating the institution’s identity into structured editorial formats across print, digital and public-facing applications.

Problem Statement and Goals

The Humboldt Forum brings together exhibitions, collections, events and perspectives from very different cultural and institutional contexts. The challenge was to create communication that could accommodate this complexity without losing clarity, accessibility or a recognizable institutional voice.

Design Process and Methodology

I worked with typography, grids, hierarchy and modular layouts to establish principles that could respond to different quantities and types of information. Rather than designing isolated formats, the approach focused on creating repeatable structures that could accommodate changing content.

Key Challenges and Solutions

The diversity of subjects and formats meant that rigid templates would quickly become restrictive, while too much flexibility would weaken coherence. A modular editorial system allowed content to change substantially while maintaining a consistent underlying information hierarchy and visual language.

Outcomes and Learnings

The resulting system translated the Humboldt Forum identity into a practical communication framework across multiple touchpoints. The project strengthened my understanding of editorial design as information architecture: establishing relationships between complex content before determining its final visual expression.