Before Class, Chapter 18

The International Typographic Style is also known as the Swiss style and was large around 1950s.It included unity of design through asymmetrical organization. The design uses a mathematical grid. The designers felt the designs and type had a purpose and was not simply there for design. Clarity and order was ideal.

Ernst Keller was the biggest influence in the movement. He liked symbolic imagery, geometric forms, vibrant colors, and expressive edges and letterings. The Swiss style started in the School of Design in Basel. The school was influenced by De Stijl and Bauhaus. Other prominent people are Theo Ballmer, and Max Bill. Bill started the geometric layouts with absolute order and his designs included linear division of harmonious parts, modular grids, arithmetic and geometric progressions, and the equalization of contrasting and complimenting relationships. Bill and Otl Aicher, along with other co-founders, started the Ulm Institute of Design in Ulm, Germany. It continued until 1968 and taught 3 branches of semiotics and the philosophical theory of signs and symbols.The study of Semiotics included semantics, syntactics, and pragmatics.

Max Huber was big because while Bill wanted simplistic, Huber wanted vitality and intricacy. It is said Huber's images pushed the edge of chaos but was also able to maintain order in the midst of the complexity.

Anton Stankowski was big from 1929-1937 in Zurich. After WWII, his work was able to create forms to communicate invisible processes and physical forces. He was able to master constructivist designs.

The Swiss Style consisted of new sans-serif type families, that were more refined than the mathematically drafted ones of the past. Univers was created with 21 sans-serif fonts by Adrian Frutiger in 1954. The Deberny and Peignot foundry in Paris invested over 200,000 hours of engraving, retouching and hand punching to create the 35,000 matrices needed to make all 21 fonts in the full range of sizes. Edouard Hoffman and Max Miedinger upgraded the Akzidenz Grotesk fonts and refined them in the mid 1950s. They were re-released as Neue Haas Grotesk, but was renamed Helvetica.

A well known typogographer is Hermann Zapf. His was first a photo retoucher, then studied calligraphy, and eventually entered a printing firm. Later he became a freelance book and typographic designer and by 22 his first of fifty-five typefaces. Many of Zapf's designs from the 1940s-1950s are major typefaces today. Examples are Palatino, Melior, and Optima.

Emil Ruder was taught at the Zurich School of Arts and Crafts and later taught at the Basel School of Design. He realized the implications and potentials of Univers and so he and his students explored the contrasts, textures, and scale possibilities. His 1967 book, Typographic: A Manual of Design, which was a huge influence on the world.  In 1947, Armin Hofmann started teaching graphic design at the Basel School, also after completing at Zurich School. With Ruder he developed an educational model in 1908.

Swiss movement began the unified international movement when the "New Graphic Design" journal was published in 1959. This journal gave the philosophy and accomplishments of the Swiss movement to the international audience. After WWII, increased trade allowed multinational corporations to operate in more than a hundred different countries. Eventually the need for communicative clarity, multilingual formats and pictographs  was needed for people around the word to comprehend information.

The Swiss movement was big for post war American design. It ran between 1940s - 1970s Rudolph DeHarak started in LA but moved to New York where he started his own design studio. He recognized the early qualities in Swiss during the late 1950s and adapted the grid structures and asymmetrical balance.  The Swiss style was quickly empraced by american corporate and institutional graphics during the 1960s and continued through the 1980s. An example from the book is MIT, which kept their level of quality and imagination through time. They based their graphic-design program on the grid and sans-serif typography.