German graphic designers

Helmuth Ellgaard (3 March 1913 in Hadersleben – 22 April 1980 in Kiel) was a German illustrator, artist and journalist.
Helmuth Ellgaard was born in the then German Haderslev/Hadersleben (now in Nordslesvig, Denmark). In 1928, the family left Haderslev, which became Danish after the Schleswig Plebiscites, for Kiel. Soon, Ellgaard caught an interest in drawing and painting. He was educated at the Art academy in Kiel in 1934, while simultaneously working as a news illustrator for the Kieler Neuste Nachrichten newspaper. He also learned to sketch, and his specialty became fast sketches with charcoal.

In 1938 he was newly wed and moved to Berlin. After the outbreak of the Second World War he became a war correspondent, and as a lieutenant in the Luftwaffe he participated in many raids as a journalist, including the Battle of Britain in 1940. His works were published in the renowned weekly magazine Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung. During the war his two sons were born; Peter (1940) and Holger (1943).
The war had destroyed the large publishing houses in Berlin, and new newspapers and magazines were started in Hamburg and Munich among other places. The Ellgaard family therefore moved to Munich, where Helmuth Ellgaard participated in starting the illustrated magazine Revue, which was one of the many new weekly magazines in post-war West Germany. Ellgaard worked as an employee of the editorial staff as an image editor and news illustrator. In almost every issue there were illustrations by him, from 1953 also in color. His role models were the American Norman Rockwell and the Dane Kurt Ard.
In 1956 he chose to become independent, and moved with the family to Hamburg. There he illustrated books and worked for advertising agencies. However, his important work during the period 1954 to 1961 was the illustration of a large number of film posters, of which the poster from 1959 for the anti-war film "The Bridge" (Die Brücke) is considered to be his most notable work. He died of a heart attack in 1980, 67 years old.
In 2003, his two sons Peter and Holger Ellgaard donated a large part of his works to the Haus der Geschichte in Bonn.

Lucian Bernhard (born Emil Kahn, March 15, 1883 – May 29, 1972) was a German graphic designer, type designer, professor, interior designer, and artist during the first half of the twentieth century.

Oskar Hermann Werner Hadank, generally referred to as O.H.W. Hadank (born 17 August 1889 in Berlin; died 17 May 1965 in Hamburg) was a German graphic designer.

Peter Behrens (14 April 1868 – 27 February 1940) was a leading German architect, graphic and industrial designer, best known for his early pioneering AEG Turbine Hall in Berlin in 1909. He had a long career, designing objects, typefaces, and important buildings in a range of styles from the 1900s to the 1930s. He was a foundation member of the German Werkbund in 1907, when he also began designing for AEG, pioneered corporate design, graphic design, producing typefaces, objects, and buildings for the company. In the next few years, he became a successful architect, a leader of the rationalist / classical German Reform Movement of the 1910s. After WW1 he turned to Brick Expressionism, designing the remarkable Hoechst Administration Building outside Frankfurt, and from the mid-1920s increasingly to New Objectivity. He was also an educator, heading the architecture school at Academy of Fine Arts Vienna from 1922 to 1936. As a well known architect he produced design across Germany, in other European countries, Russia and England. Several of the leading names of European modernism worked for him when they were starting out in the 1910s, including Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius.