short vita

Sonja Knecht was born in Indonesia, grew up in Venezuela, and is deep-rooted in Deutsch. She graduated as a translator from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Southern Germany; her first jobs as a graphic artist and desktop publisher in Hamburg led her to typography and to her passion, text.

An expert for corporate text, brand language, and verbal identity, Sonja was Director Text and Senior Manager Communications at Erik Spiekermann’s design agency Edenspiekermann. She set up a 30-strong editorial team for TYPO International Design Talks and served as their moderator. Sonja works for clients such as the Bauhaus-Archiv/Museum für Gestaltung, Bosch, Cornelsen, Gestalten, Hering Berlin, Deutsche Post DHL, Messe Frankfurt, Mercedes Benz, Oxfam Germany. She is a board member of Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI); she supports Die Wortfinder, the Buchstabenmuseum, and Typostammtisch Berlin; and she also is a member of the program advisory board of Urania Berlin.

Sonja was a lecturer for creative writing at Burg  Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle (Germany) in 2017/18, and, in 2018/19, at the Federal Education and Research Institute for Graphics in Vienna (Austria). She also was a guest lecturer at art universities in Essen, Münster, and Saarbrücken.

Since 2016, Sonja Knecht has been lecturing at Berlin University of the Arts. Her focus is to link verbal and visual design. Thus, she helped to implement the Visual Communication Basics Blog (Prof. Ulrich Schwarz, KM Thomas Lehner): editorial processes, formats, text-image concepts. In the Design for Business and Advertising class (Prof. Uwe Vock, KM Gosia Warrink), Sonja has been providing conceptual writing courses. Among exhibitions and other projects, she helped to develop the campaign for the 2019 Rundgang. Since 2020, Sonja also provides seminars on language and text at Berlin Career College’s Summer University of the Arts.

Links

txet.de