שבוע סדנאות - Repetition. Rhythm. Pattern / Heike Grebin

Repetition, pattern and rhythm may sound like musical terms, but they also play an essential role in graphic design: we repeat visual elements, arrange them into patterns, and create rhythm through variation. But how does this visual resonance emerge?

To better understand such structures, we build a bridge between graphic design and music. We look at visual compositions by designers and artists; we listen to their inner order, trace the paths of their repetitions and variations, and sketch the first outlines of our own systems.

Equipped with this set of tools, we then turn to music — to our selected songs. We examine them, sketch their acoustic structures, and translate them into graphic compositions. In doing so, we develop visual systems that ultimately dance to our music — and (almost) without using a computer.

Heike Grebin studied architecture before finding her way to graphic design. She runs the studio Troppo Design and was a professor of communication design at HAW Hamburg from 2003 to 2025. Her teaching focused on typographic information systems in the context of socio-political and technological processes. From 2005 to 2016, she curated and organized the lecture series Stilvorlagen—Design and Society at the Department of Design. Under the label “Play the System”, she explores parametric design processes in graphic design. In 2024, she was awarded the Hamburg Teaching Prize.