after
finishing design school in 1992, tina frank worked for metadesign berlin
and later nofrontiere, vienna. in 1995 she started her own design company
`inwirements`, which was quickly followed by the foundation of u.r.l., a
company specialised in developing visual concepts and appearances for companies,
organizations, products, events, and conferences.since then tina frank has been working a lot with musicians and made design for music: whether it was the collaboration with people like mathias gmachl (together they performed as skot, an audiovisual `band`) or chix on speed, or designing cd- and record sleeves for labels such as mego, chocolate industries, idea recordings, staubgold or even making music videos.
during the same time another wide range of corporate design concepts have been created at u.r.l.: from conferences on the future of information-technology (scope 1, 1999) to websites for cultural organizations and products (design now austria, music information center austria, zoom kindermuseum, popfile, etc..)
works can be seen at:
www.frank.at
www.url.at
www.skot.at
press text for the gasbook dvd
tina frank, born in the 70ies of the 20th century, somewhere in austria.
you've seen the videos, recognised the logos, worn the t-shirt, admired the album artwork, probably even listened to the music held within, possibly even liked what you heard. now you can enjoy, interact, play with, be inspired by, do something else to, or even fall asleep to this shiny digital versatile disc.
but, what is all this tina frank business?
often quoted as being 'the mego designer'. although only 50% of the labels artwork could be called 'pure frank', all works pass through her harddisc complex at least once for the all important logo placement and the tidying up of sometimes messy first ideas.
like much of the audio her covers represents (or should we say sells?) tina's work took advantage of late 20th century price reduction/product advancement of computerised digital hardware. that's not to say things were made easier, far from it. but, previously thought impossible graphic structures and ideas came to being.
it also made the crossfade between still graphics to moving visuals seamless and before we knew it people started using the term avant garde. no, no, no..... thats a dirty word, sorry two dirty words and the kids know it. the audio-visual excursions of the skot project are far superior in their ability to fuck with peoples heads to ever have to worry about things like that.
there is no 'generic frank style', just a desire to make something more slicing, more cutting, but above all something you want to look at, at least more than once. which, in this day and age of information overload, option paralysis and lightweight copyists, is something to stand up for.
aurore mcedwards, baltimore, june 2002