I’m Christoph Zillgens and I’m a designer and author from Germany. I live and work in the uttermost west of our country, where I enjoy the my time with my family in the countryside.
Doing branding, design, frontend development, and print, I'd call myself a Jack of many trades. But above all there is a deep passion for great typography, caring for the details, and trying to keep it simple — or saying it much better with the words of Dieter Rams: “Less, but better”. This blog is my place to write about exactly these things, hopefully more than once a year ;-)
A Brief history
In 2003 I started out as a trained media designer for print, but when I discovered the many possibilities of the young web, I knew that this would be my path. Here, I could merge my love for design with technology, tinkering around with HTML and CSS, making things interactive and share them with the world.
In 2009 I became self-employed doing mostly web design and the occasional print job. I started blogging, as well, but only managed to publish a few dozen articles over the next couple of years. Nonetheless, this led to some professional articles I wrote for the German print magazines t3n and Screenguide.
In 2012 I wrote the first German Book about Responsive Web Design. The book was received quite well and the next couple of years I would travel around Germany, teaching Responsive Web Design to companies and agencies and helping them implementing it in their web projects.
In 2015 I wanted to focus more on client work again and together with two pals I co-founded a small local agency called Rurwerk, named after a river that runs right through the middle of our county.
Since 2019 I run Rurwerk on my own, working on small client projects with strong focus on typography, simple and clear design and fast performance.