My name is Andy Markison and I am an art director for MedTech and new business here at medicalvision

How did you come to Germany?

How did I come to Germany? My wife is German and I was planning a trip to go on vacation here in Germany while I lived in California, in the United States. And I figured I would ask somebody or try to find somebody to ask where to go and visit in Germany. And figured what better way than to ask a local. So, I met my wife online, and she was trying to improve her English, so it was kind of a win, win situation and we became penpals pretty quickly. Eventually she came to visit me in California, and that was the beginning of my path to Germany.

What do you do at medicalvision?

I work a lot with strategy and planning and concepts for our customers. I do a lot for MedTech but I also do our own medicalvision branding. So, a lot of brand strategy. And I do text for international clients in English and of course I do a lot of design and layouts like a normal graphic designer would do.

What is the most important element in good design?

The most important element in good design I would say is simplicity. I think there is a tendency to make something complex and abstract, and I think that that's usually not the way to go because you have to keep in mind that a lot of the time, your audience has a short attention span, and they can only retain so much information. So, when we do things like develop content, the messages should not be complex and there shouldn't be many messages because we need to keep in mind what our customer or your target group can actually remember.

And this also applies, in terms of visual content. We do a lot of stuff for exhibitions and the tendency is that customers will often want to get their money's worth and fill up a wall as much as they can with graphics and images, but that also makes it so that the quality

of the content is watered down. So something very simple is a lot more effective in my opinion.

What is one thing people don’t know about being a designer?

I think most people think that being a graphic designer is just about making pretty pictures and I don't think that that is the case at all. Graphic design is a lot of organization of data to communicate a message and I think that's one of the things that people don't think. They think it's basically being an artist, but mostly it's a lot about organizing information

Do you have a dream project?

I think what I would like to do if I ever had the chance one day would be to work for a cause that means something to me. Something where I feel like it could make the world a little bit of a better place. Whether that's a commercial project or a nonprofit wouldn't really matter to me. It'd be something where I felt like at the end of the day I had created something that made the world a little bit better and made it a little bit better for my son to grow up in.

What’s the weirdest thing in your home?

The weirdest thing in my house? My son has a full-size Stormtrooper helmet that he can wear. And it's wider than his shoulders, so it looks big on him.