Ask any designer about the type of work they had to do when they first started, and you’ll hear a lot about grunt work and coffee runs, or having the thankless job of creating logos for your Uncle’s plumbing business. It’s a very rare thing that someone starts working with a major agency or in-house for a global brand right off the bat. Likely because of all those Gladwellian hours you need to put in or all those dues you’re supposed to be paying.

Eike König has a similar story too. Today, he leads his team at Hort, the Berlin-based creative consultancy and design agency he founded, but before all that, he was designing flyers for techno shows and skateboard shops. Scattered throughout his time at university, he worked a few internships, and as luck would have it, one of them turned out to be the German techno record label Logic Records. Eventually, he would be asked to become the art director for the label, and he would leave school.

The job allowed him to experiment, and there was no one fixed style for their album covers—you could find collages and photos, or even something more typographic in nature. But, Eike wanted to strike out on his own, and in 1994 he started his own agency.