»We still feature sexy images, but it's more art than eroticism now«. A quote from a video flashes up as a woman's hand with red fingernails scrolls through the pages of a magazine. For Mike Koedinger, CEO of Maison Moderne, this is the difference between ›old porn‹, today mostly found in the digital space, and printed erotica. The erotic becomes an event, a tactile experience to be touched, its ownership savoured, not concealed.

»Hello Munich!« roars Pekka Toivonen to his stunned audience. The crowd falls silent for a video that plays with conventions from the porn and sex industry. Between latex fetish, a quickie threesome, oversized plastic penises and cucumbers Toivonen creates an absurd world in which young people mimic an air of sexual disengagement. A sad world of clichés and porn gestures that forfeits any erotic charge and at the same time makes merciless fun of these conventions. This is art that you have to respond to. The audience was struck dumb for a moment.

»It’s perfect: qved is our part-time refuge from Düsseldorf Carnival festivities!« The audience smiles at Mirjam Sieger’s witty opening of her talk about »EINS EINS EINS«, a platform to establish links, help gain overviews, and reveal the connections between magazines and their makers. In doing so, the »EINS EINS EINS« team doesn’t focus on topicality. The choice and chronology of the projects presented depends rather on the individual interests of the editors.

»The really interesting approaches come if and when the individual is ready to accept his evolutionary plan.« Commenting on his initial thesis in the same breath, Mike Meiré dryly and concisely states: »I know that at first this sounds like shit...« The explanation is actually quite simple, as the values most important to the designer, once hyped as a child prodigy of design and today established in the international industry, are really rather old fashioned: Attitude. Subjectivity. Personality. »Things tend to polarise because they are so subjective. They have to.

Digitization, social networks, new settings and conditions have dramatically changed the world of magazines and editorial design in the last few years. The speed of this transformation has also influenced designs and concepts. In her work, Canadian designer and author Michèle Champagne benefits from the individual dynamics of the Open Source.

»A shoe box full of illustrators copied phone numbers,« is how Raban Ruddigkeit describes the beginnings of »freestyle«, a website that presents approximately 1,000 Illustrators - now sorted alphabetically, supplemented with stories and personal profiles which Ruddigkeit has here gathered into a selection of five: