design museum presents
the swiss international style april 01 until june 09 28 shad thames london
an exhibition tracing the history of the swiss international style
Tracing the growth, evolution and development of The International Style, this exhibition attempts to bring together the works and philosophies of some of the greatest minds which made what is arguably one of the strongest impacts on what we know graphic design to be today. This exhibit draws a path of sorts, which traces through milestones in Swiss style including: ‘new typography’, the grid, Helvetica, postwar design, and Photo-Graphic design. As you move through the exhibit you will be introduced to a series of ten artists, designers, writers, educators, architects, craftsmen, typographers, and creators which shaped the International Style. The works vary in medium,
method, and execution but are all intertwined as they stand on the same keystone philosophies that shaped what constitutes the International Style. As you move through the exhibition you will be introduced to each artist and given a brief biography which outlines the events in each of their lives that relate to the International Style. There is also much information about particular works by each designer as well as a scattering of in-depth information about particular methods which some of these artists developed in their lives. The museum has also made a keen effort to embody elements of the Swiss Style in the presentation of this exhibit through a heraldic quality: a care for detail, clear, refined and inventive typography for all documentation, and hybrid creations which take elements of the exhibitions artists and fuses them with modern methods of design. Above all else we hope that upon leaving the museum you have developed a further understanding of what the International Style truly means and how far the scope of their methods has reached in terms of shaping the world of
max bill
Max Bill was an all encompassing artist of the Swiss style. He was much more than just a key player in the development of the International Style. He was a designer, artist, architect, writer, and teacher. Originally trained as a silversmith at Zurich Kunstgewerbeschule from 19247until 1929. He worked as a freelance designer for about a year in Zurich until 1930 when he joined the Swiss Werkbund. From there he designed for the famous Swiss Pavilion, ‘Milan Triennale’ (which he won a Gold Medal for) in 1936.
Bill was a member of various association and councils during the 1950s and 1960s: the association of German workers, joined in 1956; the B.S.A. or Association of Swiss Workers in 1959; town council of Zurich from 1961-1968; Helvetian commission for art from 1961-1969; and National Swiss Council from 1967-1971. Between 1967 and 1968, he constructed and decorated the atelier of Zumikon. He taught environmental design from 1967 to 1974 at the Upper Institute of Figurative Arts of Hamburg. In 1968, he was given the Award for Art by the city of Zurich. At the end of the 1960s, retrospective exhibitions were dedicated to Bill at museums in Bern, Hannover, DĂźsseldorf, The Hague, Zurich, Paris, and Grenoble. During the 1970s and the 1980s, Bill continued his theoretical activity and was frequently invited to hold conferences in schools and
important athenaeums. Many of his sculptures can be found in public spaces in Europe, abroad, and in the collections of the world’s most important museums. In 1972, he became a member of the Academy for the Arts in Berlin. In 1973, he was an outstanding member
of the ”Accademia Fiamminga delle Scienze, Letteratura e Arti Decorative” and honorary council for UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization). In 1979, he was a member of the council of the Bauhaus Archival Association of Berlin.
armin hoffman
By the age of 27 Armin Hofmann had already completed an apprenticeship in lithography and had begun teaching typography at the Basel School of Design. He is considered a major player in the development of the International Style. His colleagues and students were integral in adding to work and theories that surrounded the Swiss International Style, which stressed a belief in an absolute and universal style of graphic design. The style of design they created had a goal of communication above all else, practiced new techniques of photo-typesetting, photo-montage and experimental composition and heavily favored sans-serif typography.
He taught for several years at the Basel School of Design and he was not there long before he replaced Emil Ruder as the head of the school. The Swiss International Style, and Hofmann, thought that one of the most efficient forms of communications was the poster and Hofmann spent much of his career designing posters, in particularly for the Basel Stadt Theater. Just as Emil Ruder and Joseph M端ller-Brockmann did, Hofmann wrote a book outlining his philosophies and practices. His Graphic Design Manual was, and still is, a reference book for all graphic designers.
The grid system is an aid, not a guarantee.
josef m端ller brockmann
josef müller brockmann As with most graphic designers that can be classified as part of the Swiss International Style, Joseph Müller-Brockmann was influenced by the ideas of several different design and art movements including Constructivism, De Stijl, Suprematism and the Bauhaus. He is perhaps the most well-known Swiss designer and his name is probably the most easily recognized when talking about the period. He was born and raised in Switzerland and by the age of 43 he became a teacher at the Zurich school of arts and crafts. Perhaps his most decisive work was done for the Zurich Town Hall as poster advertisements for its theater productions. He published several books, including The Graphic Artist and His Problems and Grid Systems in Graphic Design. These books provide an in-depth analysis of his work practices and philosophies, and provide an excellent foundation for young graphic designers wishing to learn more about the profession. He spent most of his life working and teaching, even into the early 1990s when he toured the US
and Canada speaking about his work. He died in Zurich in 1996. Brockman’s poster designs for Zurich Town Hall are hailed as some of the most primary and representational examples of what came out of the International Style. His simple methods for laying out text through the use of the grid and modular text blocking allowed for a clean canvas upon which he could place mathematically derived graphic elements. These posters show just how strong a simple, yet surgically precise design can envelop a viewer so strongly that they feel almost compelled to fully absorb the information place on the page before their eyes. A prime example of this is his poster for the symphony performances of Beethoven, which he made for the Zurich concert hall’s orchestra performance. One might describe his works of this period as the epitome of graphic purity.
Even if it is true that commonplace advertising and exhibitions of bad taste are indicative of the mental capacity of the man in the street, the opposing argument is equally valid. Bromidic advertising catering to that bad taste merely perpetuates that mediocrity and denies him one of the most easily accessible means of aesthetic development.
paul rand
paul rand Paul Rand (born Peretz Rosenbaum) was a well-known American graphic designer, best known for his corporate logo designs. Rand was educated at the Pratt Institute from 1929 until 1932, followed by the Parsons School of Design from 1932 tunil 1933, and finally at the Art Students League from 1933 until 1934. He is considered one of the originators of the Swiss Style or International Style of graphic design. From 1956 to 1969, and beginning again in 1974, Rand taught design at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Rand was invited to join the New York Art Directors Club Hall of Fame in 1972. He designed many posters for advertising purposes as well as designing a slew of corporate identities, including the logos for IBM, UPS and ABC. If the word “legend” has any meaning in the graphic arts and if the term legendary can be applied with accuracy to the career of any designer, it can certainly be applied to Mr. Rand. In 1951 Paul had completed his first career as a designer of media promotion at Esquire-Coronet – and as an outstanding cover designer for Apparel Arts and Directions. He was well along on a second career as an advertising designer at the William Weintraub agency, which he had joined as art director at its founding. Paul Rand’s book, Thoughts on Design, with reproductions of almost one hundred of his designs and some of the best words yet written on graphic design, had been published four years earlier. The publishing of Thoughts on Design
cemented his international reputation and identified him as a designer of influence to the global design world. In an interesting way the chronology of Paul Rand’s design experience has paralleled the development of the modern design movement. Paul Rand’s first career in media promotion and cover design ran
from 1937 to 1941, his second career in advertising design ran from 1941 to 1954, and his third career in corporate identification began in 1954. Paralleling these three careers there has been a consuming interest in design education and Paul Rand’s fourth career as an educator started at Cooper Union in 1942. He taught at Pratt Institute in 1946 and in 1956 he accepted a post at Yale University’s graduate school of design where he held the title of Professor of Graphic Design. Most contemporary designers are aware of Paul Rand’s successful and compelling contributions to advertising design. What is not well known is the significant role he played in setting the pattern for future approaches to the advertising concept. Paul was probably the first of a long and distinguished line of art directors to work with and appreciate the unique talent of William Bernbach. Paul described his first meeting with Bernbach as “akin to Columbus discovering America”, and went on to say, “This was my first encounter with a copywriter who
understood visual ideas and who didn’t come in with a yellow copy pad and a preconceived notion of what the layout should look like”. Paul spent fourteen years in advertising where he demonstrated the importance of the art director in advertising and helped break the isolation that once surrounded the art department. The final thought of his Thoughts on Design is a statement, which encompasses much of his design philosophies. It states: “Even if it is true that commonplace advertising and exhibitions of bad taste are indicative of the mental capacity of the man in the street, the opposing argument is equally valid. Bromidic advertising catering to that bad taste merely perpetuates that mediocrity and denies him one of the most easily accessible means of aesthetic development”.
Typography has one plain duty before it and that is to convey information in writing. No argument or consideration can absolve typography from this duty.
emil ruder
Emil Ruder was a typographer and graphic designer who, born in Switzerland in 1914, helped Armin Hofmann form the Basel School of Design and establish the style of design known as the International Style or International Swiss Style. He taught that, above all, typography’s purpose was to communicate ideas through writing. He placed a heavy importance on sans-serif typefaces and his work is both clear and concise, especially his typography. Like most designers classified as part of the Swiss Design movement he favored asymmetrical compositions, placing a high importance on the counters of characters and the negative space of compositions. A friend and associate of Hofmann, Frutiger and Müller Brockmann, Ruder played a key role in the development of graphic design in the 1940s and 50s. Many designers have emulated his style, and his use of grids in design
has influenced the development of web design on many levels. Ruder published a famous book which outlined basic grammar of typography titled Emil Ruder: Typography. The text was published by Arthur Niggli in 1967 and was successful in its spreading of knowledge regarding the newly defined International Style. It became a basic text for graphic design schools throughout North America and Europe. In 1962 he helped to found the International Center for the Typographic Arts in New York. Emil Ruder can be said to be one of the most important designers of the International Style – many of his works are on display in this exhibit.
jan tshichold
Early in his career Jan Tschichold was a very opinionated man when it came to elements of the International Style, writing at length about all that had gone wrong since the industrialization of printing, and in particular of the complacency and mediocrity dogging typography between the wars. He wrote about revolutionary concepts like asymmetrical page layout and reinvention of the alphabet; and for this bolshevism he was incarcerated by the Nazis. Riding out the war in England, Tschichold worked with Penguin Books to establish design standards, composing manuals and sets of instruction which are as valuable today as fifty years ago. Later on he was no less of a firebrand, but wrote instead about learning from the past, and he
became a great scholar and collector of printed and scribal manuscripts. Just as with Bodoni and Caslon, there is no one font called Garamond. Sabon, which Tschichold designed in 1964, is very true to Claude Garamond’s type design. In its quiet elegance and perfect internal proportions, Sabon, if used well, may be the most legible text face of all, and its digital incarnation is eminently usable. Tschinhold was a major player in the development of typographic style during the International Style however his methods employed use of serif fonts which were not popular during the forefront of the style’s development so his works did not see much use during the movement itself. However, he was still a major example of what the International Style was about.
carlo vivarelli
Carlo Vivarelli was a graphic designer, painter and sculptor who was born in Zurich and studied at the renowned Kunstgewerbeschule from 1934-39 and in 1946 became Art Director at the progressive avant garde Studio Boggeri in Milan. During this time and when he returned to his native Switzerland he became one of the leaders of the Swiss Modernists and in 1958 became a co-founder of Neue Grafik magazine. In his later years he concentrated more on his concrete art and sculptures. Vivarelli was broad in his studies. His strength cannot be tied to one particular method or medium. The symbol for Twist-Drill manufacturers which he designed in 1945 is a prime example of the ideals the International Style had for unison and synergy.
His print advertisements were also prime examples of the classic Modular method employed by almost all designers from the International Style movement. He created posters, which were both completely based, in graphic art and elements as well as posters that married the elements of photography and printed text. This exhibit has many examples of his work ranging in mediums and methods. This includes examples of his posters, logos as well as some fine examples of his work in concrete art.
walter herdeg Walter Herdeg was very much a graphic designer. He studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Z端rich, created many different corporate identities(just as the practice was beginning to become a standard),
and even formed his own design company with Walter Amstutz. What he is best known for, however, is the creation and publication of Graphis. An international journal of visual communication, Graphis was first
published by Herdeg towards the end of the Second World War. The magazine showcases work and interviews from designers and illustrators from all over the world in an effort to share their work with other audiences. In the beginning it served as one of what were, at the time, only a few vessels which exposed the western world to the design work being done in Europe.
Herdeg served as the editor of the magazine for 246 issues (the magazine is still in publication) as well as the Graphis Design Annuals which showed the best and brightest work from the year prior to their publication. Graphis was a seminal force in the shaping of design culture and it continues to educate, expand and foster the world of graphic design today.
otto baumberger Otto Baumberger was born in 1889 and died in 1961. He was a poster designer, painter, and illustrator. He apprenticed in a Zurich lithographic printer’s studio. He studied in many places, most notably Paris, Munich, and London. He was a lithographic draughtsman and art director for the Zurich printers Wolfensberger from 1911 until 1913. He also worked doing theatre designs for leading director Max Reinhardt from 1920 until 1922. Following his work doing theatre designs for Reinhardt he returned to Zurich where he worked as an assistant teacher at Kunstgewerbeschule until 1933. He also lectured in the architectural department at Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule (Federal Technical Institute) from 1931 until 1959. In his lifetime he designed more than 230 posters in wide range of styles. Half a dozen of Baumberger’s works of the 1920s and 1930s are pioneering examples of Modernist style. Baumberger has been hailed as one of the first Swiss poster designer, even though his personal desire for artistic recognition was not for such a classification. As an employee of Wolfensberger AG he acquired a strong grasp of lithography techniques and used this skill to advance and renew the medium thus developing the International/Swiss style for poster design. Baumberger was also ahead
of his time in recognizing important aspects of consumer advertising. Without actually creating a style of his own he sought the most appropriate way of conveying a message. His first attempts at this used original imagery which leaned towards a sense of abstraction (through the way the photograph was taken) and used this as a base to synthesize an invigorating relationship between the image and lettering elements. The diversity of his work exemplifies the history and development of Swiss poster design in the first half of the twentieth-century showing the development from the painterly style to
more surgical and accurate style that became the building blocks for graphic art driven poster design. One of his strongest works would the overcoat poster, which advertised the clothing store, PKZ (1923). This remarkable work muddles the line between a photograph and an illustration. The
poster represents what was referred to as ‘New Objectivity’ or the opposite of Expressionism. The phrase ‘the camera never lies’ was an accepted notation of the time and Baumberger’s photorealistic drawing worked as a commentary on this by distorting public perception on what qualifies ‘the real’.
karl gerstner Gerstner was born in 1930. He was a graphic designer, painter, and writer. He studied at Basel Allgemeine Gewerbeschule in 1944. He compltered an apprenticeship in Fritz Buhler’s studio during his time at Allgemeine in Basel. His time spent at AGS totaled from 1944 until 1948. From there he worked freelance for
Geigy from 1949 until 1952. From there he went on to work as a freelance designer in Basel from 1952 until 1958. He then attened Hans Finsler’s photography photography classes at Zurich Kunstgerwerbeschule from 1955 until 1956. In 1955 he also completed the redesign of Werk. In 1956 he also
worked as the designer for Geigy’s bicentenary. In 1958 he went on a lecture tour through the United States teaching design students about the principles of design theory. One of his major milestones occurred in 1959 when he opened Gerstner+Kutter advertising agency in Basel. During this time he puchlied Die neue Graphic with Kutter and ‘Integral Typography’ in a special issue of TM. Gerstner+Kutter held a special exhibition in New York in 1960 which he participated in. Following the success of the exhibition Gerstner+Kutter became GGK (1962) and opened another office in Dusseldorf, Germany in 1968. Gerstner exhibited internationally and was recognized globally for his design aesthetic and personal style. He also wrote several books, which were curcial contributions to the understanding and development of Swiss graphic design. In one of his more famous works Visual Language, Gerstner recalls in depth upon his fifty years
of active work as a graphic designer. He documents the ups and downs of a designers professional life through textual explanation as well as a slew of visual examples that work to further drive the intensity of the experiences he had working in the field. Gerstner also takes careful measure to describe in detail how he managed to be such a successful and groundbreaking designer. In doing so he pulls much of his reference from the history of postwar design and how the style played a defining role in his later success. Print Magazine describes the book as follows: “It is a rich visual autobiography, a retrospective, and a memoir. Given its large size and weight, it suggests comparisons to Milton Glaser’s ‘Art Is Work’, Steven Heller’s ‘Paul Rand’, or Wolfgang Weingart’s ‘Typography’. Within its pages, however, it is remarkably different from any of those. One of the great virtues of this book is that it is self-exemplary: Written, organized, and designed by Gerstner, it does not just discuss his work, it is a model of what it enjoins.”
gottfried honegger
Honegger was born in Zurich, Switzerland in 1917 and began his studies in the field of art at the age of 15 at Kunstgerwerbeschule in Zurich, Switzerland. He studied in-shop window displays. In 1937 he began teaching at Kunstgerwerbeschule as well as opening a studio with his wife Warja Lavater. Unlike many of the other designers of this time and movement, Honegger also completed wartime military service. He stopped teaching at Kunstgerwerbeschule in 1948 and took on a new position as an Art director at Geigy in Basel.
He worked there from 1955 until 1958. In 1958 he moved to New York, NY to begin a career as a Concrete artist. He returns to Europe to further develop his skill and works at the studio of Sam Francis in Paris. In 1985 he received the ‘Ordre des Arts et des Lettres’ from Jack Lang, the French minister of culture. In 1990, upon his completion of the Espaces de l’art Concret an inauguration was held in Mouans-Sartoux, France. In 2001 he became a member of the Legion d’honneur and maintains residency in France. Most of his
major exhibitions have been in Zurich, with a few in Paris and New York. Honegger is a unique artist for this particular exhibit as his works are major to the history of Concrete-Constructivist Art and stands as a shining example of an alternative medium unto which the International Style had an impact on. The works of Honegger has its roots in the Russian Avant-Garde as well as in Piet Mondrian’s style for abstraction. His methods do not pull from the material world – rather, they challenge the viewers to examine works based on the compositions color, geometric form, and material, which gives freedom for them to develop their own definitions for the meaning of each work.
On the graphic side, Honegger uses many of the basic elements that are central to the International Style. This truth can be seen strongly in his A4 booklet created for the Swiss Undustrial Absrasives LTD. (SIA) which he made in 1956. The basic arrangement of rectangles contrasts with the photographs that are filled with organic, curvy forms creating the stark ‘opposites’ relationship style that is seen throughout examples of the International Style.
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design museum 28 shad thames london 020 7403 6933