One

It’s mid-October, and we’re strolling near the central borough of Mitte, along the yellow painted line that runs where the Berlin Wall once stood. There’s a distinct elegance to Sauerteig’s movements. He punctuates his sentences with slow twirls of the wrist, and has a tendency to push back his hair between thoughts. Smital, shorter and soft spoken with plaintive eyes, is walking alongside in a denim shirt and blue beanie, interjecting occasionally with anecdotes.

Both men grew up in the same area of East Berlin, just a few blocks from one another, and became friends after meeting at a party as teenagers. They remained close after the wall came down in 1989 and eventually enrolled in art school together on the west side of the city. Today, they spend most of their waking lives sitting across from one another at their studio in Wedding, interacting with a wordless familiarity.

Growing up, their primary exposure to Western culture came through John Peel’s radio shows, and as teenagers, they went to punk rock concerts held in darkened churches. They knew nothing of video games, and had never touched a computer. But they had hints of what was on the other side of the wall, and they knew it was always out of reach.

"When you grow up in a divided city like Berlin was at that time, it’s always in front of you, the fact that you live a restricted life," Smital said. "It was normal for me back then because it was never different. But when I think about it now it’s very scary."

The son of a general in the East German army, Sauerteig became politically active in his teenage years, protesting against fraudulent elections at the early Leipzig demonstrations that would put the first cracks in the wall. After high school he worked as an electrician for East German television, but quit after a year because he grew tired of producing state propaganda. For a while, he made ends meet by selling hand-knit backpacks at markets with his wife.

Smital wasn’t as politically active, though he shared Sauerteig’s desire to move west. He wanted to go to college, but didn’t want to serve the mandatory three years in the military beforehand. So he ended up working odd jobs, assisting photographers and taking tickets at horse races. When the wall came down in 1989, everything suddenly changed.

"The first time when I went to West Berlin, it was very colorful," Smital said. "It sounds sort of cliché but it was really like that. You didn’t have all this advertising in the East. That could be seen as annoying now, but back then it was something completely new and nice."

Sauerteig was 21 when Germany reunified, and his first child had just been born. His earliest recollections of West Berlin involve wandering up and down the aisles of a supermarket, mesmerized by the labeling and packaging of all the products.

"Everything was really black and white in the East," he said. "All the buildings were worn down. No billboards, not even that many trees. In the West it was shiny, everything was colorful."

Smital and Sauerteig eventually enrolled together at the Berlin Institute of Design; Sauerteig studied video arts, and Smital gravitated toward typography and magazine designs. Together, they devoured magazines like i-D, Ray Gun, and The Safe, lured by their abstract layouts and experimental typography, and developed an affinity for brand design. For them, the fall of the wall ushered in a new world with new aesthetics. It also introduced them to Vermehr.

Vermehr is technically German, but Germany isn’t really his home. He spent the first years of his life in Venezuela, where his father worked for a pharmaceutical company. His family eventually settled down in Guatemala, where he spent most of his adolescence, and today he lives with his wife and children in Vancouver, working with his colleagues through Google Hangouts.

Unlike his colleagues, Vermehr grew up in a house filled with technology and Western culture — Apple II computers, Frank Zappa — yet growing up in Guatemala left him with a confused sense of cultural identity. He went to a German school, but the kids in his neighborhood were Guatemalan, and he had trouble finding friends who shared his deepening interests in the arts. He wasn’t stuck behind a wall, but he had the same desire to break away.

"I felt alien to Guatemala," he explains. "For me, Guatemala was a bit too tight, too closed. There was not much art, and I was really longing to move away to Europe. I was thirsty for different stuff."

The country was also in the middle of decades-long political strife, with dictators, guerilla groups, and militias vying for power. The unrest never directly affected him or his family, though he has vivid memories of an abduction he witnessed as a teenager.

"There would be five guys with machine guns, always in a Toyota car with tinted windows," he remembered, before describing the scene he saw unfold in his neighborhood. "And this guy that was kidnapped was working for the unions, I guess. But he was kidnapped and he looked at us as they were taking him away and said, ‘Help me, help me.’ Things like that, you pick up as a teenager and it was not… I don’t know, it was really bad."

As an adult, both his life and work have been driven by a fierce sense of restlessness, sending him zig-zagging across the globe.

"I like to move forward," he said. "I’m not a guy who goes back too often. I have not gone back to Guatemala for 15 years or so."

Vermehr moved to Berlin after high school, where he took drawing classes and snuck into art-school lectures. He eventually enrolled at the Essen design school in Cologne, Germany, and, after a cross-country US trip in a Volkswagen van with his wife, returned to the capital to work at MetaDesign, a graphic design firm.

It was there, in 1994, that he met Sauerteig, a student intern at the time who was still learning his way around a desktop computer. The two first met when they were assigned to work on an exhibition in Berlin and immediately hit it off, bonding over their shared interests in music and science fiction. Sauerteig also showed a keen interest in Vermehr’s vision of screen-based design, and quickly caught on to the meticulous digital block-building that pixel art demanded. They began publishing pixel designs to their website after Sauerteig graduated from art school in 1996, and eventually brought Smital into the fold. Months later, eBoy was born.