Ian Warner is co-owner of the design consultancy State, and founder of Slab-Mag, “the heuristic journal for gonzo blurbanism”. In our little interview held at the State offices in Berlin-Tiergarten, he leads us through some defining moments of his career. And, ranging from designing he covers of the „Führerstandsmitfahrt“ (there’s a German word for you!) VHS tapes that the the Sender Freies Berlin (SFB) used to publish in the 1990’s to creating the visual identities for the likes of the Rundfunkchor Berlin and Komische Oper Berlin, wayfinding systems for the DomQuartier Salzburg and the 2015 Deutscher Architektentag, and websites for Greenpeace Magazine, Hadi Teherani architects and the author Michael Schindhelm, it has been a quite a career so far.

Warner describes the „trademark“ of State’s work as a combination of clarity and dissonance.

In 2006 Ian founded Slab-Mag, an online journal exploring architecture and urbanity from a defiantly subjective perspective. Humorous conjecture is given equal footing with detailed research, enabling the site’s five permanent writers to weaved nuanced and revealing fictions into a sprawling analysis of the built environment.

He has taught communication design at the University of Arts (UdK) and the Design Academy in Berlin, the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, has lectured at the Technical University (TU) Berlin and for students of architecture and urban studies at the AdbK Nürnberg. Since 2015 he is a co-organizer of the KAM architectural workshops held annually in Chania, Crete.