The Volkswagen Golf bar

When I was a child it was the multiplication table that challenged my imagination about the finiteness of numbers. Then came the number 100, which was just as complicated, and much later I encountered the sideways figure eight, the symbol of infinity, which to this day transcends any feeling for quantities.

And then we were asked to develop a visual representation to celebrate the 25,000,000th Volkswagen Golf coming off the production line. At first this seemed like a manageable number. But when the laser printer went on strike and could no longer handle all the many small Golf logos set at 1.37 points – the “Golf stream” – (just as unthinkable from a technical point of view), this number became increasingly interesting. How do we manage to get 25,000,000 Golf logos into one book?

While setting the logos, we also started to imagine the immense creative power, the seemingly infinite quantities of cables, rubber, metal, lights and all the processed materials. 100,000,000 tires alone (not counting the winter tires)! 25,000,000 Golfs in a row: a traffic jam surrounding our planet two and a half times. The result was the “Golf bar” – a pun on “gold bar”. An entertaining imaginary journey into the world of numbers.

Martina Grünwald about the work on and with the book