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His illustrations regularly appear on the covers of The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, he works for brands like Hermès and Google, and his work was featured in Netflix's acclaimed documentary series Abstract. Christoph Niemann is among the most influential figures in contemporary visual communication – and yet day after day he spends time looking at bad art, as he himself says. In an interview he gave during his visit to the Ladislav Sutnar Faculty of Design and Art, he explained why the ability to overcome frustration is perhaps the most important creative trait. He described how visual language works in different cultures and why it is not enough to be merely effective. Christoph Niemann is this year's winner of the Ladislav Sutnar Prize.

Your illustrations feel so effortless to me, as if someone were whispering to you what to draw. What's the most important quality of an artist or designer?

You become an artist because you see art that you like, that feels inspiring. And you want to create something similar. But here's always a contrast between seeing art and creating art. And since the seeing art usually comes first, you think that creating art has to feel the same way. And then you very soon realise that that's not the case. And the reality is that you have something that you know is not as good as it could be. And you have to turn it better. It's just like your inherent desire.  

So by default, you spend your day looking at bad art. And you have to deal with. You have to constantly go over the frustration of not being as good as you could be until you finally maybe at the end of the day get something nice. You can learn the craft, you can learn any element of design typography, photography, but this desire to keep going, this is maybe the only thing that I would say is a talent.

Is image a universal language? And how can we learn to read images?

The most basic idea of design is that you have a common cultural background, visual knowledge. If I say car, and you've never seen a car in your life, the word means nothing to you. In my drawings, I reference something that I would assume you know. So this is a learned language that you learn as a designer, but also as a human cultural being, you learn the language of the people around you.

If you expose yourself to other cultures, you realise that there are other languages. So something that is readable in one culture might not be readable in another culture and by culture I don't only mean different countries. When my kids talk to me about some YouTube star, I’ve probably never hear the name and for the he or shi is the biggest celebrity.

I think part of being an artist, a designer, is to expose yourself to that language. On one hand, graphic design must be very precise. A wayfinding system at the airport has to get me to the gate or the bathroom. There should be no room for interpretation. But I think art and also design often works more on an emotional level, where there's much more openness to interpretation and ultimately the interpretation is up to the audience.

Do you want to talk to people about your illustrations? Are you interested in what they see in it?

It's very important. If I'm trying to make a very precise journalistic or political point and if people don't get it, then I think I failed. But if I draw a landscape, then I think it's something where I express an emotion and people might read it differently. And that's totally fine. So I really think it depends on what your goal is. When you have a precise communication goal, then of course you can really judge whether it worked or not. 

Does AI understand the meaning of your illustrations?

To a large degree, yes. It's impressive what it can often do. If we try to fight this battle in terms of how powerful AI is, how impressive its results are, how technically strong it is, we will lose. So I think the one strength that we have as human beings, in the long run, is to have a culture that we care about the person on the other end being a human being. If I go to a restaurant, I want a human chef and I want a human waiter. And it's not because they're faster or cheaper, but because I care about interaction. But I think this is a culture that won't happen automatically, we have to fight for it. I think if we just go for what's cheap and what's efficient, AI will win. We have to create a culture where people care that the drawing/product service was created by humans.

Could you invite us to the upcoming exhibition in Oldenburg?

It's a large retrospective exhibition in a museum for drawing (Horst-Janssen-Museum). It opens in mid-November and run until April. And next year I have another exhibition, also quite a large one, in Erlangen, which is north of Nuremberg, just two hours from here. So if the trip to Oldenburg is too long, it might be better to visit the shorter exhibition there.