history of Modern Graphic Design
willi Kunz
Willi Kunz was born in Switzerland in 1943. He apprenticed as a typesetter and studied at the Zurich School of Arts and Crafts. He immigrated to the US in 1970 and began his career in print, publication and identity design.
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After Willi Kunz came to the US, he began working as a graphic designer at the NYC corporate identity firm Ansapach, Grossman & Portugal. One of his first assigments was working on the brand identity for Merit gasoline stations. His proposed design was critiqued as idiosyncratic and strange, but was visually striking against the other submitted design. It was selected as the company’s brand ID. Kunz gained much success and credentials with this design. It openned the doors to establishing his own design firm. Kunz picked up a poster design project for photographer Fredrich Cantor’s exhibition. He had the opportunity to be creative and break away from his studied Swiss design. He designed these posters before computers; so all typography and graphic elements were created and transferred by hand. These successful posters gained him more recognition, and he did them without fee. They were reviewed as influential examples of postmodern design.
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Furthering his accomplishments in poster design, Kunz created an extensive poster series for Columbia University’s School of Architecture evolving lecture program. With the new identity introduced with his posters, the lecture program grew in popularity and gained momentum with incoming lecturers. Measuring the success, the poster’s original print run consisted of 2,000 posters in 1984 and increased to 10,000 by 2003. The posters became a collector’s item, with students and faculty signing up just to receive the new posters. Willi Kunz has published three books covering typography and design. In his books, Typography: Macro + Microaesthetics, Typography: Formation and Transformation and 12 Typographic Interpretations, he examines typography’s role in communication and detail in design. Willi Kunz resides in New York City, and is still designing. 1 Merit ID 2 Willi Kunz ID 3 Designers Downtown ID 4 Fredrich Cantor poster 5 Fredrich Cantor poster 6 Columbia U lecture poster 7 Columbia U lecture poster
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