Designing Through the Wall: Cyan in the 1990s

Born in East Berlin, Detlaf Fiedler and Daniela Haufe started the commercial graphic design agency Cyan soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. They would go on to become some of the first poster artists to utilize early desktop publishing tools like Photoshop and QuarkXPress into their work, while also looking back and drawing from the intellectual history of the famous Bauhaus art academy.

Cyan expands upon Germany’s rich history as a leader in the printmaking world, their posters bursting with saturated colors, perfectly-executed text, and a precision of alignment few could replicate. They turn the tenets of “good design” on their head, proving that advertising does not necessarily need to be immediately interpretable to be successful. This Jewel Box show presents their early posters for the first time in New York City.