Henry Steiner: the king of graphic design

Henry Steiner hates the word "fusion".

"It's cheap, it's vulgar and it's a cop out," says the man who's become known as the father of Hong Kong design.

Steiner is the leading exponent of cross-cultural design. According to the principles he pioneered, when East meets West the two don't fuse; they collide. "Because if you just throw everything in a blender," he says, "you get mush." Instead, Steiner seeks the sparks that fly when images from different visual and cultural traditions are juxtaposed and invigorate each other. His work plays on the contrasts between East and West, high brow and low brow, old and new, the mundane and the extraordinary.

This year sees Steiner celebrating both his 80th birthday and the 50th anniversary of Steiner & Co, the graphic design consultancy he founded in 1964 and which has dominated the regional field ever since. When you're in Hong Kong, there's no escaping Steiner & Co: its designs grace the billboards, are plastered to the buildings and adorn the banknotes in our wallets. Steiner's client list through the years has included Asiaweek, Citic Pacific, Dah Sing Bank, Dow Jones, Duty Free Shoppers, the Far Eastern Economic Review, The Hong Kong Jockey Club, Hongkong Land, IBM, Lane Crawford, Mandarin Oriental, MTR Corporation, Ocean Terminal, San Miguel, Shangri-La, Korea's Ssangyong Group and Unilever.

a middle-class Jewish family in Austria in 1934. His father had a thriving dental practice in Baden bei Wien, a resort town south of Vienna, and his mother was a skilled seamstress.

"My parents enjoyed a nice bourgeois life," he says, "until 1938." That was the year of the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany. "The Anschluss terrified my mother and she started searching desperately for a way to get us out of Austria."