ARMIN HOFMANN Swiss Designer
"Another reason for my interest in the use of black-and-white in design lies in my intense preoccupation with the forms and analysis of signs and symbols." - Armin Hofmann
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Armin Hofmann Swiss Designer
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Hofmann's logo
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Artwork
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Legendary Swiss graphic designer and educator, Armin Hofmann is recognized for his immeasurable inuence on generations of designers, teaching the power and elegance of simplicity and clarity through a timeless aesthetic, always informed by context
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ARMIN SWISS HOFMANN DESIGNER
Hofmann was born in Winterthur, Switzerland, in 1920. After studying at the School of Arts and Crafts in Zurich, he worked as a lithographer in Basel and Bern, and opened a studio in Basel. In 1947, he began teaching at the Basel School of Arts and Crafts after meeting Emil Ruder on a train and learning that the school was looking for a teacher. Hofmann would remain there for 40 years. In 1968, he initiated the advanced class for graphic design, and in 1973 he became head of the graphic design department.
He ďŹ rst taught in the United States at Philadelphia College of Art in 1955, and shortly after began teaching at Yale University, where he played a key role until his resignation in 1991. In 1965, he published Graphic Design Manual, a distillation of the essential principles of his rational approach to teaching design. Nearly half a century later, the revised edition of this pedagogical classic is still in print.
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Armin Hofmann is one of the most exceptionally influential teachers the field of graphic design has seen. He is also a designer of great accomplishment, a leading member of a remarkable generation of Swiss practitioners whose work and thinking continues to have a determining effect on the international understanding of graphic design.
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There is, however, nothing doctrinaire or circumscribed about Hofmann’s Swissness. His insights and practice transcend any sense of nationality or “school” and attain a level that many of those who experienced the challenge of studying under his tutelage would regard as elemental.
A significant number of those students—among them Kenneth Hiebert, April Greiman, Robert Probst, Steff Geissbuhler, Hans-Ulrich Allemann, Inge Druckrey and the late Dan Friedman—went on to become leading designers and educators themselves.
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Hofmann has been described as one of the most outstanding personalities in Swiss graphic design history. Along with the more well known Josef Müller Brockmann, Emil Ruder and Max Bill, Hofmann helped shape modernist-inspired graphic design beyond recognition. Without ‘The International Typographic Style’, also known as the Swiss Style of design, contemporary graphic design would be almost unrecognisable. The readability and cleanliness of the style as well as its asymmetric layouts, use of a grids and sans-serif typefaces have helped define how we design today. Designers today are still taking the best elements from this era of design to create a whole new contemporary, visual aesthetic.
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Hofmann saw his designs, in part, as didactic demonstrations of these principles. The posters he created in the late 1950s and 1960s for cultural clients such as the Kunsthalle Basel and the Stadttheater Basel possess great typographic and photographic purity of form. In a theater poster, he interprets the dramatic experience of watching and listening with mesmerizingly large and grainy photos of an ear and eye, amplifying the impact by reducing the visual idea to its essential components.
In Hofmann’s 1959 poster for the ballet Giselle, the stark white typographic tower of the title—note the intermediary dot of the “i”—holds the blurring halftone of the dancer’s pirouette in a state of dynamic balance and grace. A promotional poster for Herman Miller titled “Furniture of our Times” becomes a visual meditation on shapes for sitting on, visualized as a collection of near-abstract silhouettes.
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“In its purity of form and purposeful expression, Hofmann’s work is uniquely personal,” says Allemann. “It also has soul.” For Robert and Alison Probst, who was also Hofmann’s student, these enduring designs are the work of “a master of his craft with a superior sense of aesthetics. His work deals with the universal language of signs and symbols, often including serendipity and always aiming for timeless beauty.”
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It is easy today to underestimate the impression that these posters made in the streets. Hofmann’s sparing use of black and white had an argumentative and even ethical purpose. In the early days of the post-war consumer society, his work proposed (we might now think over-optimistically) a visual culture founded on an ideal of thoughtful restraint. “I have endeavored to do something to counteract the increasing trivialization of color evident since the Second World War on billboards, in modern utensils and in the entertainment industry,” he writes. “I tried to create a kind of counterpicture.”
The coming of color TV only strengthened his resolve; all the “musicality” of color was lost. To generate expressive energy in a design, he would use color only in carefully determined patches within a neutral area. “I feel that a sensible and meaningful form of advertising can be achieved by simplification of the formal language and by restraint in the treatment of the verbal message,” he writes. “I was not prompted by advertising considerations in my work but rather by a feeling of regret that an important economic instrument should have begun to affect the cultural life of society so adversely.”
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“Through the removal of color, objects become neutralized and as interchangeable as letters of the alphabet. Above all, I am interested in the way an object changes in meaning when its context changes�
Armin Hofmann
AR TWO RK Armin Hofmann has each achieved international recognition for their contributions as artists and educators in their respective disciplines. Though the Swiss couple’s careers have unavoidably overlapped, their work had never been exhibited together. The subtle inuences they exchanged over the years allowed each of them to develop distinctive, yet compatible philosophies in their work. 11
Armin Hofmann has shaped the world of graphic design and graphic design education on an international scale through his teachings, writings, and works. Born in Winterthur, Switzerland, he is credited for the development of "Swiss Design" while teaching at the Basel School of Design where he began his career as a teacher at the early age of 26.
He continued teaching there for 40 years. Armin has been a visiting lecturer at the Museum College of Art in Philadelphia, has taught as a Professor at Yale University since 1956, and has been a guest lecturer at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India. In 1973, he founded the internationally known Summer Program in Graphic Design in Brissago, Switzerland. Armin Hofmann’s work has been exhibited at major museums around the world including the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
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Armin Hofmann, das holzals bau stoff, linocut, 1952.
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Armin Hofmann, poster for the Basel theater production of Giselle, 1959.
Armin Hofmann, poster for Herman Miller furniture collection
Armin Hofmann, Stadt Theater Basel
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Armin Hofmann, logotype for the Basel Civic Theater, 1954.
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Armin Hofmann, Plakate aus der Sammlung des Gewerbe museums Basel, 1964
Armin Hofmann, poster for Wilhelm Tell
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“I believe that one is more likely to develop a better perception of color by looking at the subtle harmonies of black-and-white images than by looking at the multi-and-overcolored illusions color photography often creates�
Armin Hofmann
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Armin Hofmann's work never really ďŹ t easily into the cool, functional, design genre known as the Swiss International Style. His work goes beyond being a part of a mere style. The beauty of it is that it refuses to be put in a category at all and thus cannot be copied. However, what you can take from his work is the spirit with which it is created. You can try to understand the formal issues and contexts it addresses and you can seek to embody this in your own work.
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Armin Hofmann
“In my own work, I feel compelled to set an example: to cultivate a corner of unity and to struggle against dismemberment and fragmentation in the field of design”