Dr. phil. in art. Frank Bittner

Frank Bittner has an unusual CV. After studying art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg in the nineties, he decided – more for economic reasons than for reasons of the heart – to take a further course in communication design and finally to study communication sciences in Würzburg. He completed all three courses and started working firstly as a graphic designer and then as an art and creative director in an advertising agency in the early noughties – eventually becoming self-employed in 2003 as a partner in his agency. Since then, Bittner has worked in various agencies as a senior executive, co-owner, or owner. He has been running an advertising agency in Bad Tölz since 2013.

At the same time, after completing his doctorate in 2012, Frank Bittner took up a lectureship at a Munich university, which he held until 2018. He was mainly concerned with the “grammar of visual communication” and with the thesis that all visual communication – and thus also art – follows the aspects of rhetoric. Since 2018, he has been dedicating his time to his work in his Tölz agency.

It was the Corona pandemic and the lockdown that accompanied it that led him to fulfill a long-held dream in 2019 – the realization of stage classics as graphic novels. He was already haunted by this idea during his first-degree course, and now he began to put it into practice – albeit not as a draftsman himself.

Bittner founded – in addition to the advertising office – a comic publishing house in which he now employs several draftsmen to realize the artistic books that he eventually publishes. In addition to the lovers of classic literature, he counts above all on distribution through schools, which use the books in their curricula.