Typography: A Manual of Design

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YSS: The course at the Merz Academy was unstructured, in contrast to your current teaching methods at Basle, which demand strict discipline from your students. How do they react to these methods? He was also an influential educator, retiring in 1987. In 1965 he wrote the Graphic Design Manual, a popular textbook in the field.

Two main Swiss design schools were big contributors to the International Typographic Style history: the Basel Design School that changed their methods to use grid systems in their design work, and the Kunstgewerbeschule led by Ernst Keller, known as the father of Swiss Design. Many of his students became influential Swiss Style graphic designers. Keller preferred impactful posters, unusual layouts, and sans serif typefaces. He believed that design should adapt to the content and not the other way around. The New Home by Ernst Keller, 1928 licensed under CC BY 4.0 What Is Swiss Style? YSS: For me the most surprising works at your recent exhibition were the sketchy, conceptual notes, not just because they encapsulate a spontaneous, artistic sensibility, but because they seem to give an insight into your inner world. This book is the legacy of Emil Ruder, one of the originator of Swiss Style, famous throughout the world for the use of asymmetric layouts, use of a grid, sans-serif typefaces and flush left, ragged right text. His holistic approach is still recognized as fundamental for graphic designers and typographers all over the world. This volume represents a critical reflection on his teaching and practice and a life- time of accumulated knowledge. Bornin Zurich, Switzerland on March 20, 1914, Ruder entered his adventures in design as a teenager. Swiss Design was important because designers established principles based on objectivity and clarity. While there are many characteristics of Swiss Design, designers still found a way to make dynamic and exciting posters. In the present day, we see many of the characteristics of Swiss Design still applied. Let's take a look at some of the elements that made Swiss Design famous: The Grid SystemYvonne Schwemer-Scheddin: Retrospectives like your recent exhibition in Darmstadt always have something of a narcissistic element to them. Along with Richard Paul Lohse, Carlo Vivarelli, and Hans Neuburg, he founded Neue Grafik, a Zürich-based publication that only lasted from 1958–1965, but which shaped the international conversation about contemporary design. What if Frutiger had agreed to the alteration of Univers italic in the early 1960s? Hoffmann had not balked at the slight changes needed to fit Helvetica to the German linotype machine in 1960. Further adjustments were necessary to make it work with English and American linotype machines, something that was not completed until early 1965. Thus, there was a small window in which Univers could have been made available to English and American designers before Helvetica was. And thus it, instead of Helvetica, could have become the crown prince at the Linotype company. WW: Without wine, music, the company of friends and, in the past, heavy smoking, those sketches and personal notes wouldn’t exist. Nor would that exhibition have taken the form that it did. My sketches show visions, moments of madness, idiocy. They contain nonsense, humour, animation, depression – everything that can and can’t be done in this funny, beautiful world. Sometimes, after a bottle of wine, I come up with some remarkable drawings which seems to reflect just how I feel at that moment. The craziest ideas come especially at night. I set them down in brief sketches and carry them around with me until I’ve forgotten what they were for, or I feel the time is right to make one more attempt to complete the project. This constant collecting of ideas, which are then set down in words and drawings, is an essential step towards further development. It’s a way of slowly working one’s way into the technical processes of the project and preparing oneself for a new encounter with technology.

Key designers published their own textbooks and took up teaching positions in Europe, the United States, India, Latin America, Japan, and beyond, ensuring that the next generation of graphic designers was familiar with the flexible grid. Ruder began his education in design at the age of fifteen when he took a compositor's apprenticeship. By his late twenties, he began attending the Kunstgewerbeschule Zürich where the principles of Bauhaus and Tschichold's new typography were taught. [7] Hofmann also allows the serif on the number “1” to hang off the grid line so that the body of each number aligns with the letters below, thus creating a more satisfying visual rhythm. YSS: But isn’t the new technology necessary for new ideas? What about the computer, which you introduced into your typography course at Basle in January 1985?The book has changed my views about typography in various ways and i totally agree with the author's statements like "Typography has one plain duty before it and that is to convey information in writing. No argument or consideration can absolve typography from this duty.". For some designers, the Swiss Style design is synonymous with Helvetica—which means "Swiss" in its original language. It's one of the main characteristics of the style, but to really understand Swiss Design, we must look to the precedent of the movement. What is Swiss Style? Helvetica is a neo-grotesque or realist design, one influenced by the famous 19th century typeface Akzidenz-Grotesk and other German and Swiss designs. Its use became a hallmark of the International Typographic Stylethat emerged from the work of Swiss designers in the 1950s and 60s, becoming one of the most popular typefaces of the 20th century. Over the years, a wide range of variants have been released in different weights, widths and sizes, as well as matching designs for a range of non-Latin alphabets. Notable features of Helvetica as originally designed include a high x-height, the termination of strokes on horizontal or vertical lines and an unusually tight spacing between letters, which combine to give it a dense, compact appearance.

A Swiss Style visionaryRudertaught that typography's purpose was to communicate ideas through writing,especially in sans-serifmode, and he was totally committedto the discipline of letterpress typography. Beyond that, it is a comprehensive masterpiece seen in its overall structure: in the themes presented, in the comparison of similarities and contrasts, in the richness of the illustrations and the harmoniously inserted types. Behind the purely pedagogic examples of exact proportions, a rich, philosophical thinking shines through. Today, more than forty years after this book was first published, it is still widely used and referenced. For Ruder what matters the most in type design is precision, proportions andlegibility. Type is here to communicate and that is all for Ruder. In this article, we showed you what Swiss Style is, the characteristics of the movement, famous designers, and why the International Typographic Style is still relevant to this day. Emil Ruder was a Swiss Typographer and Graphic Designer, he helped Armin Hofmann form the Basel School of Design and established the style of design known as Swiss Design. Ruder also taught that above all typography’s purpose was to communicate ideas through writing. Ruder put great importance on san-serif typefaces within his work.During the same period, he was at the peak of Gestalt psychology, a current of psychology that studies perceptual phenomena and the relationship of man with the environment. Gestalt raises an ideology of vision as an autonomous and rational faculty. Gestalt was an element studied at the Bauhaus and it became the heart of design theory after World War II. Ruder andHofmanndeveloped a program structured on principles of objectivity in designthat changed everything forever. Swiss designers chose to repeat simple shapes to create structure and highlight certain design elements. Sometimes, these shapes added a sense of depth or broke the grid structure that made designs dynamic. Swiss Design rejected all of the above by embracing modernity, highlighting clarity, and making the designer an anonymous vessel for communication. The event that jump-started the International Typographic Style history was the creation of Akzidenz Grotesk by Berthold Type Foundry in 1896, with the aim of creating an objective design style.

Later, with its TrueType release in 1991, Apple licensed the core set fonts from the respective mfgrs, although Courier was once again made without IBM. For Apple’s 1991 TrueType release, Kris Holmes and I designed TT versions of Chicago, Geneva, New York, and Monaco. We told the story of the development in “ Notes on Apple 4 Fonts .” Neue Haas Grotesk was developed by the Haas foundry in Münchenstein, Switzerland, to counteract the preference of the leading modernist Swiss designers of the postwar period for Akzidenz Grotesk—a typeface sold by H. Berthold AG, a German type foundry. This was both a matter of sales and national pride… but the attempt failed. The great majority of Swiss designers continued to use Akzidenz Grotesk (commonly known as AG). The subtle addition of the ‘c’ not only avoided a possible trademark fight with a Swiss sewing machine manufacturer, but it made for a more pronounceable and hence memorable name for non-German (and non-Latin) speakers. BUT… In spite of his bent for pictorial thinking, he was never tempted to indulge in merely playful designs in which the actual purpose of printing - legibility - would be lost. [10] He brought the mathematical principles of the Concrete art movement into all his design work which is especially evident in his use of flexible grids. Because he saw grid systems as an extension of Concrete geometry, he denied claims that he invented the design grid.

Why Switzerland?

This is one of the many instances in which Hofmann breaks from a gridded structure in favor of design sensibility. While the majority of the text mathematically relates to the placement of other elements within the poster, the dot on top of the “i” in the title extends beyond the ascension of the letterforms. It also is round (dots and periods in most sans-serif typefaces at this time are square), cheekily nodding to where the dancer’s knee would be and cleverly tying the title to the image. A lover of asymmetry himself,Ruder’sclear and concise designs “developed sensitivity to negative or unprinted spaces, including the spaces between and inside letterforms” per Philip Meggs.