Critzla started off as a sign and poster painter in East Germany and launched his career as an independent designer in 1994—deep-routed in the Berlin music scene—designing flyers, record sleeves, and posters, not to mention the first 12 issues Flyer, a magazine about Berlin’s club scene. Critzla is a founding member of Pfadfinderei, a graphic and motion design studio that doubles as one of the world’s most popular groups of VJs. Whether providing haunting visuals for Moderat or live VJing at the Louis Vuitton store opening in Paris with Pharell Williams, Pfadfinderei have done for visuals what DJs did to music.
He’s also a type geek and a type designer himself. Critzla designed the typeface FF Localizer for the book of the same name—Gestalten Verlag’s first release—and the well known FF TradeMarker. He also developed FF Magda Clean together with Henning Krause. All have been released in the FontFont library. He further released fonts through the Linotype library (LT DownTown, LT Mindline, LT GoTekk) and as well others through Gestalten Fonts (Franz Jäger, Flomaster, Starlet/Star) for which he’s a founding member and contributing editor since 2003.
