Elena
Creation, ideas and marketing
The ideas come from Elena: a motif, a line, a mood of colour that suits a room. She has a say in what earns a place on a wall, and she makes sure the posters find their people — shops, presence, the way we speak.
ahoy
Two on the high seas
Kunstkutter is neither an agency nor a publisher — it is the two of us: Elena and Martin, at home in Hamburg. We create the designs: the idea, the colours, the lettering. We work them out and decide what earns a place on a wall. And we think you should be able to see how a design like that comes about.
In short
- Who: Elena and Martin, two people in Hamburg.
- Designs: the idea, the selection and the finishing are ours. AI tools are part of the toolbox; the decision is not.
- Printing: by Gelato, based in Oslo, as close to your address as possible — and only once you order.
- Paper: 200 gsm, semi-matt.
- Buying: on Etsy, JUNIQE or Displate. This site has no checkout.
Martin
Creation, design and technology
Martin does the design work: composition, colour and type, detail work all the way to print quality — this is where an idea turns into a design that holds a wall. And he builds everything technical around it, this website included.
How a design comes about
It starts with an idea: an animal wearing headphones, a line, a mood of colour that suits a room. For the imagery we also work with AI tools — just as we work with a camera, a pen and an image editor. They give us drafts to choose from. Only what really convinces us goes any further.
Those designs then go through our hands: balancing colours and contrast, removing artefacts, correcting details or reassembling the elements entirely until the composition holds, setting the type, bringing format and resolution up to print quality.
No design leaves us the way it comes out of a generator. The decision about what is good enough is not made by a program.
Who prints the posters
Printing does not happen in our flat but at a partner who does nothing else: Gelato, a company based in Oslo that brings together print shops in many countries — so your poster is made as close as possible to the address it is going to.
We did not leave the choice of paper to chance. It began with test prints: ordered, laid side by side, rejected again. What stayed is a semi-matt 200 gsm paper, protected against light and moisture — strong colours, hardly any glare, and it feels like something when you unpack it. Printing starts only once you order: nothing sits in a warehouse, and nothing is produced on the off chance.
The example images
The views in living rooms show how a poster works in a space. They are not photos of our own flats but composites: a photo of a room, our design in a frame, carefully fitted in. Software helps with cutting out and fitting. The frames, furniture and props in them are not part of the product.
This website
We built it ourselves, and an AI assistant helps us do it — it writes code with us, we check and decide. It has no checkout: you buy on Etsy, JUNIQE or Displate, and what data this website processes is set out in our privacy policy (in German); it is less than you would expect.
Why we write this down
“Was this made with AI?” is a fair question and it deserves an honest answer. To us AI is one tool among several — useful, but not the artist. Behind every design you see here are two people who picked it, worked it out and decided it was good.
What now?
Have a look around — and if a question is left over, the answer may already be in our frequently asked questions.