Typography: A Manual of Design

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Hollis R. Swiss Graphic Design: The Origins and Growth of an International Style, 1920—1965. New Haven: Yale University Press: 2001. Emil Ruder was born in Zurich, Switzerland on March 20, 1914. [9] Ruder was trained as a typesetter in Basel (1929-1933), and studied in Paris from 1938-1939. [5] :149 Ruder published a basic grammar of typography entitled, Typographie. The text was published in German, English and French, by Swiss publisher Arthur Niggli in 1967. [10] The book helped spread and propagate the Swiss Style, and became a basic text for graphic design and typography programs in Europe and North America. In 1962 he helped to found the International Center for the Typographic Arts (ICTA) in New York. [11] Education and career [ edit ]

For Emil Ruder, the goal of typography was to communicate ideas through writing, promoting the good and the beautiful in word and image, to open the way to the arts. Armin Hofmann (HonRDI) (29 June 1920 – 18 December 2020) was a Swiss graphic designer. One of the leading masters of Swiss design.He began his career in 1947 as a teacher at the Allgemeine Gewerbeschule Basel School of Art and Crafts at the age of twenty-six. Hofmann followed Emil Ruder as head of the graphic design department at the Schule für Gestaltung Basel (Basel School of Design) and was instrumental in developing the graphic design style known as the Swiss Style. His teaching methods were unorthodox and broad based, setting new standards that became widely known in design education institutions throughout the world. His independent insights as an educator, married with his rich and innovative powers of visual expression, created a body of work enormously varied – books, exhibitions, stage sets, logotypes, symbols, typography, posters, sign systems, and environmental graphics. His work is recognized for its reliance on the fundamental elements of graphic form – point, line, and shape – while subtly conveying simplicity, complexity, representation, and abstraction. Originating in Russia, Germany and The Netherlands in the 1920s, stimulated by the artistic avant-garde and alongside the International Style in architecture. He is well known for his posters, which emphasized economical use of colour and fonts, in reaction to what Hofmann regarded as the "trivialization of colour." His posters have been widely exhibited as works of art in major galleries, such as the New York Museum of Modern Art. Ruderencouraged thefew, selected studentsto care about the maths of the visual communication, literally establishing the massive Swiss Designmovement. Helvetica did not become widely used in the United States until 1968. Its heyday was the 1970s, the era of corporate identity and signage programs. Helvetica was everywhere, from the logos of Fortune 500 companies to airports to the National Park Service. Noting this, Leslie Savan wrote “This Typeface is Changing Your Life” for The Village Voice in 1976. That was the year that Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak released the Apple I personal computer. It was also the bicentennial of the United States. Since its emergence in the 1950s, no other graphic design legacy has had a greater impact than the Swiss grid. Whether adhering to it, playing with it, or decrying it, it is the staple of mid-century Modernism whose influence has never waned.But there is a good reason that he settled on Helvetica. Of these and other various options, only Helvetica is both embraced by the design profession and available to the general populace as a free font. It is thus found in both high and low design. In contrast, Arial and Comic Sans are shunned by professional designers while Univers is unknown to laymen. These included Chicago, New York, Geneva, Monaco, San Francisco, and a few others, but not the later PostScript “core set” of Helvetica, Times, Courier, Symbol, which were not released until the PostScript LaserWriter came out in 1985. Additional faces, including Palatino, New Century Schoolbook. Bookman, Avant Garde Gothic, Zapf Chancery, and Zapf Dingbats came out with the LaserWriter Plus in 1986.

WW: On the whole I get on very well with my students. They know they can ask me anything, and that I’m there if they need me. This means that it’s a pleasure, rather than a hard slog, to do analytical work with them. By itself, typography is as boring as hell: what makes it exciting is how you interpret it. You have to make the teaching come alive, stage by stage. And you have to be clear about why the basic exercises are so important, explaining to students that they will need to know how to equalise capital letters in the outside world, for example when they’re doing signage on a building. After twenty-five years of teaching, Ruder published a heavily illustrated book capturing his ideas, methods and approach. The book, Typographie: A Manual for Design, represents a critical reflection on Ruder’s teaching and practice as well as a lifetime of accumulated knowledge. [4] Other than publishing his book Typographie, [10] he is known for his use of the grid system in Swiss Style design as well as his poster designs. In 1954 the French type foundry Deberny & Peignot wanted to add a linear sans serif type in several weights to the range of the Lumitype fonts. Adrian Frutiger, the foundry’s art director, suggested refraining from adapting an existing alphabet. He wanted to instead make a new font that would, above all, be suitable for the typesetting of longer texts — quite an exciting challenge for a sans-serif font at that time. Starting with his old sketches from his student days at the School for the Applied Arts in Zurich, he created the Univers type family. In 1957, the family was released by Deberny & Peignot, and afterwards, it was produced by Linotype. What should be clear from these four counterfactual scenarios is that none of them alone can account for Helvetica’s current celebrity status. It is the concatenation of events over the past halfcentury that has been responsible. Like dominoes, each of those pivotal events had an impact on the following one. And thus, the only way that another typeface such as Univers would have attained the wide recognition of Helvetica is if a similar series of magic moments had occurred for it. Such moments would have followed a different trajectory. For instance, Univers may have become more popular among American designers than Helvetica if a student of Emil Ruder, rather than Massimo Vignelli, had been invited to be a partner at Unimark in 1965. Thus, the counterfactual history game can be played many ways. Although it is mere speculation in the end, it remains an enjoyable exercise, one that stresses the importance of the idiosyncratic circumstances of time and place over intrinsic characteristics. Helvetica forever? Maybe. Maybe not.Akzidenz-Grotesk is a sans-serif typeface (the typefaces which do not use serifs, which means that these typefaces does not have tails on the end of their characters) originally released by the H. Berthold AG type foundry in 1896 under the title Akzidenz-Grotesk. It was the first sans-serif typeface to be widely used and influenced many later Neo-Grotesque typefaces. Helvetica’s current ubiquity is not due to its widespread adoption by Modernist-inclined graphic designers in the 1970s but rather by its availability as a free font on personal computers. What if the financial entanglement among Haas, Stempel and German Linotype had not existed? If a German foundry other than Stempel had owned part of Haas, the deal with German Linotype may never have happened. Both Bauer and Berthold, viewing Neue Haas Grotesk as a rival to their own types Folio and Akzidenz Grotesk, respectively, would not have supported a license.

The courses at Bauhaus encouraged students to incorporate technology into their designs, as well as emphasizing the need to create design that could be mass-produced. This is what led to the utilitarian-style design typically attributed to the Bauhaus movement. Using ‘ form follows function’, students were taught to make everyday objects more beautiful, while still being accessible. In all, the Bauhaus movement believed ‘ less is more’, in everything from colors to furniture to teapots to architecture.

Some of the bitterness in this statement surely comes from the fact that the development of Neue Helvetica in 1983 ironically followed the blueprint Frutiger had established for Univers in 1957, right down to the numbering of each member of the family. BUT… 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. The book helped spread and propagate the Swiss Style, and became a basic text for graphic design and typography programs in Europe and North America. 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.