Abstract City: Christoph Niemann’s Visual Essays
By Maria Popova
Since 2008, Christoph Niemann — LEGO-lover, imagination instigator, metaphorical chicken-chaser — has been delighting us with his visual blog for The New York Times, in which he has explored everything from his love-hate relationship with coffee to the fall of the Berlin Wall to his obsession with maps to the familiar drudgery of red-eye flights. Abstract City gathers sixteen of his visual essays, infused with his signature blend of humor, thoughtfulness, and exquisite conceptual freshness. An additional chapter on his creative process, echoing his excellent Creative Mornings talk on the same subject, presents the ultimate cherry on top.


Digital camera: Add 30 percent. (Because the particular model you picked is out of stock, and the one that’s left is more expensive. Plus sales tax.)
Burger and beer: Add 60 percent. (Tax and tip for you and for that friend from Europe who left early and ‘didn’t know’ that you have to pay tax and tip.)
Phone plans: Add 130 percent. (To cover F.C.C., U.S.F., T.R.S., A.B.C., C.I.A. and LOL.)’

A few years later I was similarly devastated when my parents announced that for our big summer vacation we would go . . . hiking.’

For good measure I have added my bagel preferences over the same period. (1) Drip coffee, (2) Starbucks, (3) blueberry bagels, (4) sesame bagels, (5) poppy-seed bagels, (6) everything bagels
Please don’t hold my brief affair with blueberry bagels against me. I cured myself of this aberration.’



Germany, with a history so full of iron-fisted terror, war and wanton violence, had finally experienced a revolution without a single bullet being fired.

PASCALS, for example, measure the pressure applied to a certain area.
COULOMBS measure electric charge (that can occur if said area is a synthetic carpet)
DECIBELS measure the intensity of the trouble the physicist gets into because he didn’t take off his shoes first.’
Entertaining and enlightening, Abstract City is an exquisite feat of visual storytelling, at once endlessly refreshing and endlessly familiar in the universality of the human condition at the heart of Niemann’s illustrations.
BONUS: If you’re in New York this month, I’m moderating an AIGA talk with Christoph on April 18, exploring the evolution of illustration in the Information Age — join us!
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Published April 3, 2012
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https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/04/03/abstract-city-christoph-niemann/
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