Heike Nehl

Heike Nehl stud­ied Vi­sual Com­mu­ni­ca­tion at the FH Biele­feld Uni­ver­sity of Ap­plied Sci­ences, com­plet­ing a the­sis on con­tem­po­rary British graphic de­sign.

In 1990, she be­gan work­ing at MetaDe­sign in Berlin, which was fol­lowed in 1993 by a pe­riod in the USA at Meta West in San Fran­cisco.

In 1994, she co-founded Moni­teurs – De­sign of Ana­log and Dig­i­tal Me­dia. At the same time she be­gan co-work on the in­de­pen­dent font la­bel Face2­Face (with Xplicit ffm), to ex­plore the de­sign po­ten­tial of type with ex­per­i­men­tal fonts and un­con­ven­tional in­ter­faces.

Nowa­days, to­gether with Sibylle Schlaich, she is the owner and man­ager of Moni­teurs GmbH – Com­mu­ni­ca­tion De­sign, fo­cus­ing on pro­jects in the fields of cor­po­rate de­sign and in­for­ma­tion de­sign.

Heike Nehl has taught var­i­ous sub­jects at at dif­fer­ent uni­ver­si­ties, such as In­ter­ac­tion de­sign at the Fach­hochschule Biele­feld, Ty­pog­ra­phy at the Cologne Uni­ver­sity of Ap­plied Sci­ences, Me­dia Con­cept at the Beuth Uni­ver­sity of Ap­plied Sci­ences in Berlin, and In­for­ma­tion De­sign at the Bauhaus Uni­ver­sity in Weimar. in 2013 she was a guest pro­fes­sor at the Chi­ne­sisch Deutschen Kun­stakademie (Chi­nese Ger­man Acad­emy of the Arts) in Hangzhou, China. Since 2025, she has held an honorary professorship in Signage and Spatial Communication at the University of Fine Arts Saar.

She is the ed­i­tor of emo­tional dig­i­tal – A Source­book of Con­tem­po­rary Ty­po­graph­ics, Look Book In­for­ma­tion­de­sign and 1:1 Ori­en­ta­tion, Sig­nage, Iden­tity. She is co-author of “Airport Wayfinding”, published by Niggli in 2021.

She has given talks at con­fer­ences such as TYPO Berlin, Cre­ative Morn­ings, Ty­po­graphic De­sign Mu­nich, Day of Ty­pog­ra­phy Bern, Di­men­sions of Mo­bil­ity/​Dessau, Smart Airports Asia, Sign Design Society and oth­ers.


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