Lucian Föhr got his first introduction to graphic design at New Vista High School, but it was a chance encounter with Todd Berger outside his dad’s house that led him to pursue his Wednesday internship at Berger’s design studio.
Now 22 years and hundreds of projects later, this self-taught duo operates under their namesake studio out of North Boulder, Berger & Föhr, known for both world-class design and fine art. Their partnership has always had a collaborative art practice, but this is the first time that both fully operate in the same space, with their design setup in the front and their drawing machines in the back.
They’ve deliberately kept this studio small and focused, prioritizing the work itself over management structures or scale. With each client and project, they focus on clarity and intention, refining every element with what they call “quiet rigor.”
They acknowledge that design work—in particular brand identity—is inherently ephemeral. Companies evolve, rebrand, merge, or vanish, and the visual systems they’ve so carefully built often disappear with them. Their art practice provides the perfect foil to this reality, offering an outlet for creating work that endures.
“Art is legacy,” says Berger. “If you make art with intent and people collect it, they tend to steward it into the future, and it lasts.”
In their art practice, they’re drawn to revealing the hand of the artist, thereby embracing imperfection as a way to signal human presence. This subtle evidence of touch creates the opportunity for connection between viewer and maker.
"Beautiful things happen when you let go of a bit of control,” says Berger. “But it’s hard.”
Their latest study, “Graphite Gradients,” is all about evoking a sense of the human experience through pressure, time, and decay. Each piece is the result of a graphite pencil dulling over time, and Berger and Föhr create inputs for a machine that will then draw the designs over weeks or even months, depending on the scale of the piece. They have to manually reload and resharpen the pencils several times throughout the day, often doing two to four passes of each design.
Because of this process, there’s a lot of room for error. In 10+ years of working with the drawing machines, Berger and Föhr regularly discover new variables—whether it’s increased humidity in the studio impacting the paper or a speck of dust hiding on the surface, even after thorough cleaning. They cannot simply set it and forget it, but instead have to carefully plan their days and their designs around being able to go back and forth between the two spaces.
“People assume it’s not very hands-on because of the machine, but every day we discover another variable,” says Föhr. “We set up the process, and whatever plays out is the art.”
Something that unifies both the art and design practices is a shared systems-based approach. Each begins with a self-imposed framework—structured sets of rules or constraints—within which they explore variation, iteration, and nuance. Their work is deeply process-driven, guided by a consistent hierarchy of priorities: concept, context, process, materiality, and technology.
Berger and Föhr draw from a lineage of artists and designers who explored the interplay of systems, perception, and reduction. They’ve been inspired by Jenny Holzer, Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Turrell, and Wim Crouwel, to name a few. Together, these figures and more inform a practice centered on structure, process, and the power of restraint.
With the introduction of a new large-format drawing machine, the duo is embracing fresh challenges at scale. On a larger canvas, the machine exhausts the graphite more quickly, requiring new strategies and deeper coordination. Each piece is becoming a negotiation of time, pressure, and material that they execute in tandem and sign via shared authorship.
Explore more at their newly designed BergerFohr.com.