After the war, Willy Fleckhaus began a career as a journalist, and during the 1950s he wrote on a wide variety of social and cultural topics, first for the Fährmann magazine and later for Aufwärts, a Cologne-based youth periodical of the German trade union movement. In 1953 Fleckhaus also took over the design of Aufwärts. His first layout featured minimal texts all accompanied by all-caps headlines and large-scale photos. The effect was raw and showed the hand of an amateur, but the beginnings of the signature style are present.