I have been working in visual communication since the mid-1990s — for film and television, brands, agencies and companies. For several of those years I co-ran my own agency. Over such a long stretch of time, a few things accumulate: experience, mistakes, detours, good decisions and an ever surer sense of what carries an idea and what merely distracts from it.
I have never been interested only in how something looks. What I find far more compelling is how an idea or a concept can be translated so that it actually has an effect. Something that stays with you and, at best, even moves you.
The same was true of the electronic music I produced and performed live for many years. There I learned in a different way that emotion is hard to engineer. For something to genuinely land, you have to find your own way into it and carry that feeling into the work.
Design can be technically brilliant, but if it triggers nothing, it stays empty. What interests me is the moment when structure and feeling come together and something special emerges. A kind of beauty that doesn't necessarily have to be visual. More that sense of something suddenly falling into place and becoming clearly palpable.
That is probably the closest I can get to describing what I mean by soul.
Since 2025 I have been teaching Motion Design as a freelance lecturer at the AMD Akademie Mode & Design in Düsseldorf.
For me, it isn't only about technical skills. A tool can do a great deal, but the actual design comes from the person using it. That's why I mainly try to convey an understanding of movement, rhythm and impact.
One term matters to me in particular: intention.
Why am I moving something in the first place? Why exactly like this? What effect is created by pace, dynamics, scale or timing? And what do I ultimately want it to trigger?
These questions are far more relevant to me than the question of which button to press.
Teaching, to me, also doesn't mean handing over ready-made answers. I try to make connections visible and to support students in making their own decisions and developing their own design attitude.
Today that naturally includes AI. Less as a machine for the fastest or most spectacular images, and more as something that will have to be factored into many creative processes in future. There, too, the decisive question remains why and what you use it for.
New technologies have changed and expanded my work again and again.
Right now, though, it's happening at a pace that feels new. AI plays the biggest part in that, of course. The speed of development is challenging, and at the same time it opens up possibilities I could hardly have imagined a few years ago.
Working with it, I keep noticing how quickly the results can impress you and how much harder it is to make something of your own out of them. As soon as things get specific, about a concrete idea, a brand or a particular mood, the real work begins. Then it's about deciding very consciously what you leave to the model and what you don't. Often I find myself working against the expected output rather than with it.
What interests me most these days is the combination of AI and code. Instead of only working with existing tools, I increasingly build exactly the tools I need for the task at hand. That also makes it possible to simplify existing workflows, automate recurring steps and tailor processes more precisely to each job.
Contact
Good projects start with a conversation.
Half an hour is often enough to work out what a project is really about and what's still open — more than ten pages of requirements ever could.
Feel free to get in touch even if your project is still vague.
That's often exactly when a conversation pays off.
©2026 Peter Pardeike / polymono