It seemed a normal day like any other, the computer was already humming away to itself and a comforting aroma of coffee filled the apartment. Outside the early birds twittered their merry songs of spring and the first rays of sunlight were appearing over the roofs of the houses. But it seemed this day, among hundreds of others, was to be different from the rest…

I was media designer looking for a job.

I‘d learnt my craft at one of the best advertising agencies for Flash applications at the time, although demand in this field steadily dissipated and the company in question eventually went bust.

For months, I wrote job application after job application in vain and kept my head above water with freelance work - which somehow did the trick - but I‘d almost given up on the prospect of a permanent position.

When it seemed like a completely lost cause, out of the blue Raphael, a former fellow student with whom I‘d spent my final year of education at school, wrote to me.

Since we left school, he‘d managed to become the Marketing Manager for the company he‘d trained at, nass magnet GmbH - no surprises there. Even back when we‘d been in education, I was always thinking: „That‘s someone I‘d like to collaborate with later!“

And now the time had come, as I finally had an opportunity to do so. He told me that there was a vacancy in „his department“ and explained what I‘d have to do to apply.

Without further ado he put everything in motion and that very same day I found myself facing a task which, provided I could complete it to the satisfaction of those concerned, would hopefully lead to a new job in the Marketing department of Hanoverian nass magnet GmbH. Hope again, at last. However, I now had to start producing copy, as this test piece consisted of creating Facebook posts on behalf of nass magnet.

A real challenge, because to date I‘d rarely composed written content. Obviously, typography is also part of design and I‘d certainly learnt that, it‘s just that writing copy as such and generating content at the level of the letters themselves was a whole new ballgame compared to nudging pixels around the page and creating animations. But this was THE chance I had been waiting for, as it were, and there was no way I was going to miss it.

So I tried to complete the sample piece entrusted to me as satisfactorily as possible. Arranging the words on the paper, I stared at the company‘s logo and started to doodle around it, lost in thought.

The result speaks for itself and shortly afterwards ended up as the well-known and universally admired mascot of the company group nass magnet, the „Nasscot“.

The little fellow was graced with neither a planning period, alternative concepts nor further research – its creation was that simple. When I submitted the text-based task for the vacancy, I included the Nasscot as my own personal contribution of sorts and waited a little while for the company‘s reply.

A few weeks later, another e-mail from nass magnet arrived in my inbox, this time inviting me to sign an employment contract.

The Nasscot won them over from the start, despite the fact that the people I‘d impressed weren‘t even part of my creation‘s target audience.“