Swiss graphic design — A communication tool
This is the story of how Swiss graphic design, throughout the 20th century, branched out into the world, became a recognised standard and then found its way back to its homeland
by Sascha Lötscher
The invention of book printing allowed, for the first time, the mass dissemination of every conceivable type of information, making it a harbinger of the 21st-century digital revolution. The story of the emergence of modern visual communication is, in turn, intimately tied to the Industrial Revolution. Swiss graphic design played a substantial part in this process, providing impulses that continue to resonate down to today.
In terms of printing and typography, the 19th century was an epoch of radical change. Bold typefaces, serif and sans serif all became part of the design vocabulary. Photography and photolithography began to slowly assert themselves. On the other side of the equation, a continually growing number of businesses providing products or services became established with the desire to attract greater public attention, and as such required a new repertoire of characters. Although already heavily industrialised by the end of the 19th century, the major cultural currents swept through countries other than Switzerland. Instead, talented Swiss artists gravitated to Paris, London, Brussels, Vienna, Munich or Berlin, where the stimulating environment beckoned a widening of their horizons.
It was only in the early 20th century that designers in Switzerland began to seriously engage with poster and placard design. Indeed, this urban medium encapsulates much of what distinguishes Swiss graphic design: its impact is intended to be immediate and direct, meaning that it is obliged to focus on the essentials. What had lain dormant in Art Nouveau and graphic artworks prior to World War I — a certain flatness, vivid colours — was combined with objective representational forms to create a new composite. Whilst design in other countries was still enmeshed in martial war rhetoric, the neutral Swiss Federation proved to be an ideal nursery for the seedlings of a particular school of graphic design.
The ‘invention’ of Swiss graphic design
In 1918 Ernst Keller was appointed to the Zurich Kunstgewerbeschule, the school of arts and crafts. Keller’s programme centred not on a particular style but instead concentrated on content as the core of the design task. The autonomous artistic signature was passé, replaced by a stance that emphasised the undiluted power of the objective over eccentric expressional forms or the exaggerated rhetoric of commercial propaganda.[1] Quality graphic design was no longer an artistic garnish — the work of the graphic designer no longer lay in ‘merely’ a calling, rather it became a profession. And further: what Keller was for Zurich, his student Théo Ballmer, who went on to enrol at the Bauhaus, was for Basel.
However, the pioneering first generation of Swiss graphic artists didn’t only emerge from college education, rather many of them also acquired their learning as apprentices, for instance with the venerable Swiss publishing house Orell Füssli, whose art institute was the incubator for numerous famous designers.
Herbert Matter followed the traditional route of the roaming student and learnt painting in Paris with Fernand Léger, later acting as an assistant to A. M. Cassandre. Inspired by the Russian Constructivists, he blended images and typography to create a whole. A master of photomontage, he was one of the first to harness the technique for commercial purposes. Like many before and after him, the Swiss corset was too tight, drawing him, in his case, to the land of opportunity.
The Swiss Confederation can be seen as a stubborn and narrow-minded country, but nonetheless it wasn’t impervious to new impulses from outside. Jan Tschichold, the most important typographer of the 20th century, fled here from Germany in 1933 and went on to radically re-shape Swiss typographical design: both as an innovator and — so was his increasing tendency after World War II — as a preservationist.
Others too. The German Anton Stankowski worked for almost ten years with Max Dalang’s Zurich agency, bringing with him the verve of US advertising and cultivating an intense exchange with his Swiss colleagues.[2] Swiss style became increasingly marked by an import-export of characteristics and skills.
Neutral, international, universal
The label ‘International Style’ became established with the groundbreaking New York MoMA architecture exhibition of 1932 and the tie-in publication The International Style: Architecture since 1922, advancing to become the byword for a functionalist-rationalist approach, including in graphic design.[3] As in architecture, the remit that designers had to master became far wider. It was no longer lone geniuses, instead it was collective teams who had to confront the complexities of the new assignments, whereby conceptual ideas, modular reductions and international standardisations still derived from historical traditions or regional practices.
Founded in 1926, the Chicago packaging company Container Corporation of America (CCA) not only launched Walter P. Paepcke’s career as a successful businessman, it also made him, as the founder of the Aspen Institute, the motor of the Colorado town’s ascendency to an international tourism venue, a think tank and a congress centre in one.
The path he followed had already been forged decades earlier, for instance by AEG with Peter Behrens or London Transport with Frank Pick, but it was Paepcke who made communication into an integrated business discipline. The CCA celebrated the inseparable unity of economy and culture, be it in the form of the spectacular advertisement series ‘Great Ideas of Western Man’ — a post-war campaign that ran for nearly three decades (1950–1975) to which Herbert Matter and numerous other international heavyweights contributed — or Herbert Bayer’s World Geo-Graphic Atlas (1953) — an impressive monument of information design.[4]
On the other side of the Atlantic, Adriano Olivetti set about transforming his father’s typewriter factory into a multi-operational, multinational corporation with equal élan, including hiring numerous artists, architects and product designers. This included the typesetter and graphic designer Giovanni Pintori, who was responsible for Olivetti’s corporate design; or Antonio Boggeri, who like Herbert Matter was fascinated by the artistic avant-garde and photomontage and the communicative potential that they embodied. Various important figures in the branch worked under him in Milan, for instance Bob Noorda, but also a large number of Swiss. Their designs are still greatly admired today and the Boggeri Studio became the prototype of a modern design agency.
Back in Switzerland
There is a distinct moment of simultaneousness in the fashioning of Swiss graphic design when fine art and applied art cross-fertilised each other, manifest in the Zurich Concretists who emerged from the Zurich School in the 1930s, transferring their approaches from applied to fine arts and back again. Their work made abstract concepts visible — visual mathematics, pure colours, geometric forms and grid systems that organise spaces in sophisticated proportions. Their language, with its quest for clarity, was an ideal aesthetic for internationally active companies, and one with which the next generation of Swiss graphic designers went on to take the world by storm.
Whereas since the onset of industrialisation Switzerland had very little to show for itself in terms of communication, by the end of World War II it stood at the forefront of the modern movement. Through its pragmatic neutrality and its correspondingly balanced diplomacy, the nation survived the war intact and successfully transformed itself from a booming machine-, textile- and watch-engineering and manufacturing country to a flourishing home for chemical and service industries with strong banks and insurance companies. The economic clout of these enterprises exercised a pull that went far beyond the narrow confines of the Swiss Confederation.
In 1944 Walter Amstutz and Walter Herdeg launched an ambitious project in Zurich:
The war has entered its decisive phase, and the spirit of reconstruction is already abroad. Plans made for an uncertain future can now begin to take on solid form. European culture revives from the ordeal of war; and for this revival it is essential that there should be some centre at which the truly creative forces can unite and find co-ordination.
Lying at the meeting-point of several cultures and itself a synthesis of three of them, Switzerland is ideally placed for the encouragement of that atmosphere which is salutary, if not indispensable, for intellectual discussion and the exchange of cultural and artistic ideas. It is in the hope of providing some such European focus in the artistic fields that GRAPHIS now appears, a magazine published in Switzerland and concerned with all problems attaching to a free and applied art.[5]
But Graphis is surprisingly ‘un-Swiss’. Not a bastion of asymmetrical design, no structuring bands or sans serif typefaces; instead a modest elegance that quietly yields to the content. From its inception the journal had a broad topical focus: international and multilingual, both in terms of the authors and readers alike. Whilst Graphis acted so to say as a foreign ambassador, the tandem of the Typografischen Monatsblätter and the Schweizer Graphischen Mitteilungen stood for domestic professional beliefs.
Representing an opposing trajectory, the Neue Grafik — founded in 1958 by Josef Müller-Brockmann, Richard Paul Lohse, Hans Neuburg (likewise a former student of Max Dalang’s) and Carlo Vivarelli — can be considered a propaganda ministry, as the visual mouthpiece of the Swiss style.
Motivated by the same basic philosophy as Graphis, and urged on by a publisher, Heiri Steiner set about contacting leading Swiss and French graphic designers with the vision that the world’s best practitioners in the field should meet together and exchange ideas.[6] The result was the founding of the Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI) in Paris in 1951 — Herdeg, Müller-Brockmann, Lohse, Vivarelli and Steiner, all of them former Ernst Keller students.
In 1947 Max Schmidt, who had first cut his teeth in Fritz Bühler’s office, became the advertising head of J. R. Geigy in Basel. Even today people still refer to the ‘Geigy style’, but Swissair likewise played a key role in this league, both of the companies becoming magnets for Swiss graphic talent. The fact that four national languages are spoken in Switzerland was not only an ideal basis for success in international markets and in other cultural environments, but multilingual communication also ultimately assisted the breakthrough of the typographical grid system. Originally a tool for Switzerland and its national and international companies, this system was increasingly discovered by multinational corporations, with the result that the concept of Swiss graphic design was, quite literally, transported out into the world.
The missing element in the equation was supplied by type designers. To begin with the most popular typeface was the forceful Akzidenz-Grotesk, but in the 1950s Adrian Frutiger began working at Deberny & Peignot in Paris on a pioneering font: Univers, the first typeface originally conceived as a programme, with harmonised line widths, thin, normal and thick font sizes, uniform x-heights and a special numbered classification system. Released in 1957, it filled a gap in the Swiss graphic design vocabulary, perfecting a grid-system-based typography.
Designed by Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann, the Neue Haas Grotesk — later renowned as Helvetica — appeared almost simultaneously on the market. For a layperson the differences are hard to discern, but the claim that Univers is more unique and Helvetica simply an Akzidenz-Grotesk lacking profile can still today provoke highly emotional philosophical arguments among Swiss designers.
A canon is consummated
Following the example of Olivetti, in 1956 IBM, then headed by Thomas J. Watson Jr., hired its own design director. As an architect and industrial designer, Eliot Noyes was intimately acquainted with the ideas of Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus. In contrast to Switzerland, where the evolution of Swiss graphic design was focused on the condensed messaging of posters as a medium, in the USA the defining medium was the more entertainment-orientated magazine. Noyes brought Paul Rand on board, one of the originally boisterous magazine designers of the American School, who discovered a love of the Swiss style, albeit not at first sight:
When I was first aware of what the Swiss were doing, I used to ridicule it …. I really felt that stuff was cold, and all the other clichés people use to describe Swiss design, but then I changed completely …. Granted, there is no counterpart to Swiss design in terms of something that you can describe, that you can follow, that you can systematically understand.[7]
The impulses the Noyes-Rand duo launched at IBM, they then went on to repeat at Westinghouse and Cummins.
As IBM set about searching for a design consultant for Europe, they first appointed Josef Müller-Brockmann and then Ernst Hiestand. Meanwhile Fritz Gottschalk, trained at Orell Füssli, played an equally vital part in the ongoing developments, although by striking out along a different path by establishing the graphic international style in Canada. Nevertheless — and perhaps hardly surprising considering the internationalism of the movement, rather only logical — it was a Milan-born architect (the Italians were less rigorous in the design disciplines) who took things to an extreme. Massimo Vignelli is the figure who, together with Bob Noorda, Ralph Eckerstrom (the former CCA design director) and others, founded the design-consulting firm Unimark. It was the first worldwide operating design firm — a kind of global variation of Studio Boggeri. However, following bitter disagreements, Vignelli and his wife Lella, an architect who amongst others had worked for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), started Vignelli Associates. Their whole design careers revolved around a modular system reduced to a small number of visual elements — the Vignelli canon — making both of them, in the process, into icons of the International Style.
Taken, however, as a mere aesthetic style, this type of design also had a tendency to bring forth ‘incestuous’ forms, resulting in largely uninspired compositions devoid of profile — as insipid, substitutable communication stripped of semantic content. Nowadays these kinds of excrescences serve as tools for branding bureaucrats, slapdash communication bosses and lackadaisical PR advisors.
This, told in time-lapse snapshots, is the story of how Swiss graphic design branched out into the world, became a recognised standard and then found its way back to its homeland as an internationalised style. In the meantime, there have been repeated, more-or-less-successful attempts in innumerable contexts to revive this style, be it as graphic minimalism, the normcore rebranding wave in the luxury industry, the rediscovery of two-dimensionality in car-logo design, stylistic clones from a supposedly golden era in tourism posters, or umpteen Helvetica copy-pastes.
But ultimately, thinking back about Ernst Keller and peering behind the veneer of this style, Swiss graphic design is most forceful when it combines with a particular stance that seeks its greatest inspiration in the commission itself. And, in turn, this means a critical understanding of the underlying parameters — focusing on the contents and aims. In the best case scenario — and this, in an era of information overload, is more crucial than ever — what emerges is a condensate: the most accurate, most incisive way of communicating something.
Endnotes
1. See Willy Rotzler, Fritz Schärer and Karl Wobmann, Das Plakat in der Schweiz (Zurich: Ex Libris, 1991), 46–8.
2. See Richart Hollis, Schweizer Grafik: Die Entwicklung eines internationalen Stils, 1920–1965 (Basel/Boston/Berlin: Birkhäuser, 2006), 100.
3. See ‘Internationaler Stil’, in Nikolaus Pevsner, Hugh Honour and John Fleming, Lexikon der Weltarchitektur, 3rd revised and expanded ed. (Munich: Prestel, 1992), 300–301.
4. Philip B. Meggs and Alston W. Purvis, Meggs’s History of Graphic Design, 4th ed. (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2006), 343, 345–6, 352.
5. The Publishers [Walter Amstutz and Walter Herdeg], ‘Introducing Graphis’, Graphis 1/2 (Sept./Oct. 1944), 3.
6. Fréderic Henri K. Henrion, AGI Annals — Alliance Graphique Internationale (Zurich: AGI, 1989), 239; Meggs and Purvis, Meggs’s History (see note 4), 411.
7. Quoted in Steven Heller, Paul Rand (London: Phaidon, 1999), 158.
This text was originally written in German, proofread by Ulrike Steiner and translated into english by Thomas Skeleton-Robinson. Images provided by the author.
Swiss graphic design before Swiss graphic design
The ‘invention’ of Swiss graphic design
Swiss graphic design goes international
