The ‘S’ in NGS
Seraina Baumgartner
Letters and numbers have always fascinated me. One of the first things I consciously wanted to learn was how to write and draw letters.
Watching my mother typing at home mesmerized me. And my father had to sit with me at the kitchen table for hours and make me sketches.
It was also he, my dad the Zurich municipal city draughtsman, who brought me a huge stack of Letraset sheets, pencils and all sorts of interesting things to draw and erase with, from his office.
Seraina
So I spent more hours at my little desk, filling paper after paper, while listening to Beatles records. Some of those tools are still at my desk and companions in my signwriting kit. And the Beatles are still on…
“I started my professional career in the classic Swiss way with an apprenticeship as a screen printer in Zurich.
The analogue printing process grabbed me from the first moment. I loved precision hand cutting masking film for stencils and mixing inks by eye. SB
Traditional Signwriting was not even in demand at the time. Signwriters where walking away from the craft and running vinyl cutters and digital printing machines.
After graduation I worked in different print studios. Unfortunately, screen printing was in decline. So I started to do some digital printing and vinyl cutting as well. Until the day I found myself as a full-time machine operator.
Pushing buttons and writing on keyboards.
I had to change something… and so I picked up the brush and it changed everything!
Seraina Baumgartner
