Stella Achenbach

I love traveling. It can be exhausting and expensive at times, but more importantly, it opens the world a bit wider for people who want to see and understand more of it. Understanding means observing and seeing, often even reading between the lines. To process what I had observed, I decided to wrap it into a design project I call 'Traveling Patronage.' This ongoing project of mine began as a result of traveling abroad. The goal was, and still is, to capture my observations in condensed design......

I can barely count how many times I have heard this in my life: "Take a break, Stella!" The truth is, for the longest time, I felt ashamed to even think about taking a break. It didn't make any sense. Almost like that word doesn't exist in my vocabulary. I know, partially, I could just make my heritage the culprit, but today, I believe it goes even deeper than just my Germanness. Cultural origin can help make sense of something, but while we are influenced by our environments as humans, we ar......

When I think back to my childhood, a few instances stand out. One of them was building a PC tower from scratch together with my dad after literally burning through my old Atari. You'd think I meant "burning" as a manner of speech, but literally, it went up in smoke after overplaying a racing game whose name I can't recall. One of the components of that new tower was a 3dfx Voodoo card, and it came with a game called Tomb Raider I. At the time, the only games I truly enjoyed while everyone was......