Analysing The Swiss ‘International Typographic style’.
There have been many artistic movements over the years however there haven’t been any as influential upon the development of design, especially typography, as modernism. In order to gauge this effect, this essay will first define modernism, then the features of modernist graphic design. It will then take examples of ‘Swiss’ design and American modernist design to analyse the difference between the effects of modernism on Switzerland and America. Late 19th and early 20th Century Europe was a place fraught with radical political, social, economical and cultural changes that would bring about fundamental changes in the way people were to live their lives. Technological advancements such as the introduction of the train as an accessible form of transport and the invention of the automobile would make travel outside of small settlements much easier. Changes in the way people could communicate such as the invention of the telegraph and the telephone also meant that people were more inclined to move away to where job prospects were better. Industrialisation, as well as this mass shift of society and subsequent formation of large towns and cities meant that work in factories became the most common form of employment, where before it was farming. These changes along with some others, notably the development of capitalism and massive progression in the fields of science and technology made for a ‘distinctly different experience of living in the world’. (Barnard, M. 2005, pg 112) This distinct difference is known as modernity, and modernism as an aesthetic movement came around as a result of this change. Modernism is seen as a direct response to these changes in society and advances in technology or as a critique of modernity from the artists or designers perspective. Although modernism can be difficult to define, writers like Roy Boyne and Ali Battansi identify four features separating modernism from other artistic movements. Firstly, a feature dubbed by Boyne and Rattansi as, ‘aesthetic self-reflexiveness’. (Boyne and Rattansi, 1990, pg6) The idea that the designer makes comment about their practice using the practice itself. Such as a piece of design that says something about itself or a painting that makes the act of painting its subject. The second feature is montage, the use of photographic images edited together or, ‘the disrupting