Great overview of the Swiss style | Swiss Graphic Design: The Origins and Growth of an International Style,...

awesome | Swiss Graphic Design: The Origins and Growth of an International Style, 1920-1965 | Richard Hollis

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	• Swiss Graphic Design: The Origins and Growth of an International Style, 1920-1965 Richard Hollis Yale University Press, 2006 - 272 pages average customer review:based on 6 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Tineline confusion

Hollis's book, while extensive in its documentation and admirable in its visual organization of the Swiss developments, comes to several conclusions which should be questioned. The first is the disproportionate and misguided prominence afforded Theo Ballmer as a prime influence stemming from his experience at the Bauhaus. Whatever Ballmer's influence as a poster designer in the 20s was, he had gotten his essential training in the Basel school, which underwent its own ongoing and largely independent modernist development, prior to Ballmer's very brief time at the Bauhaus. The Bauhaus influence is deemed minor by the emerging Basel school, and Ballmer's later influence in teaching photography and lettering has to be considered a lesser one.

Significant also is the confusion in reporting influences in development of the cutting edge Geigy Pharmaceuticals graphics program where the influences of Armin Hofmann and Emil Ruder as educators of the leading Geigy designers are missing. While this is inferred on page 162 in the statement that "the Geigy style originated in the teaching at the Allgemeine Gewerbeschule," the key influences in Basel--Hofmann and Ruder--are not mentioned.

Similarly, Hollis attributes Müller-Brockman's "conversion" to the influences of Lohse and Vivarelli, the evidence being the concert hall posters of 1951 and 52. While this is definitely a move in that direction from an earlier illustrative style, the most convincing change, and the style by which Müller-Brockman is widely known, emerged on the hiring of graduates of the Basel school under Armin Hofmann in 1955. This means that Hofmann and Ruder pre-date Müller-Brockman's mature style instead of being placed as p. 214 as a separate and later development--and not as a precursor feeding the larger Swiss development from a more humanistic perspective than the more constructivist direction of the Zürich school. One can argue about which contributed most to the international prominence of Swiss design, but Hollis's own statement p. 215 regarding the world-wide significance of Hofmann's Graphic Design Manual, Principles and Practice, on education is telling. Müller-Brockman's more objective approach was probably more influential in the world of corporate graphics.

Hollis betrays a bias, perhaps, in his strange analysis of Hofmann's Tell poster and omits such key poster achievements as the "Switzerland in the Roman Era" (1957). It is unfortunate that Hollis did not interview Armin and Dorothea Hofmann. They are few of the remaining key figures from the era of Hollis's investigation.

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Great overview of the Swiss style

I decided to purchase this book after watching the Helvetica DVD and was so inspired by Swiss design, I had to check out this book. I was not disappointed, pages of full colour images, and detailed explanations about the artwork and the designers intended communication. Fantastic resource for graphic design students!

awesome

This book goes into immense detail, with countless full colour reproductions of some of the seminal works in the development of Swiss graphic design. It is well laid out, and with large margins which hold thousands of tidbits of related background information; the information on many of the important designers in this movement is invaluable, and many of the reproductions are of rare works which aren't normally found in other books.

The text clearly and concisely sets out exactly how and why graphic design in Switzerland developed as it did. It is useful not only as a reference book with great insight into the period, but also as a book which is endlessly fascinating to just pick up and browse through. Highly recommended

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Swiss Graphic Design

This is a nice, well made book. It's a great reference for designers or art directors that need to put a Swiss spin on things.

Un libro recomendable para amantes del diseño gráfico

Una magnífica edición. Muchas imágenes, alguna un poco pequeña - para el tipo de imagen, se echa en falta quizá alguna imagen de detalle o incluso un encarte -, pero en líneas generales muy buena selección, y cantidad de imágenes.

Los contenidos interesantes, por tratarse de una generación histórica en el diseño gráfico universal. Es un libro muy recomendable.

Swiss graphic design and ?the Swiss Style? are crucial elements in the history of modernism. During the 1920s and ?30s, skills traditionally associated with Swiss industry, particularly pharmaceuticals and mechanical engineering, were matched by those of the country?s graphic designers, who produced their advertising and technical literature. These pioneering graphic artists saw design as part of industrial production and searched for anonymous, objective visual communication. They chose photographic images rather than illustration, and typefaces that were industrial-looking rather than those designed for books.Written by noted design authority Richard Hollis, this lavishly illustrated volume looks at the uniquely clear graphic language developed by such Swiss designers as Theo Ballmer, Max Bill, Adrian Frutiger, Karl Gerstner, Armin Hoffman, Ernst Keller, Herbert Matter, Josef Müller-Brockmann, and Jan Tschichold. The style of these artists received worldwide admiration for its formal discipline: images and text were organized by geometrical grids. Adopted internationally, the grid and sans serif typefaces such as Helvetica became the classic emblems of Swiss graphic design.Showcasing design work across a range of media, including posters, magazines, exhibition displays, brochures, advertisements, books, and film, this essential book shows how many of the Swiss designers? modernist elements remain an indispensable part of today?s graphic language.

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