- Swiss typography and the International Style
were the dominant forms of design in the 1960's and 1970's.
The rigid adherence to strict mathematical proportions
and rational typography created neutral and refined work.
But there was not an allowance for anything
unexpected, intuitive or playful.
By the mid-1960's, a younger group of Swiss designers
began to slowly break some of the rules.
Swiss designers such as Steff Geissbuhler
and Rosemarie Tissi had seen the typographic eclecticism
of the 1960's in the United States.
They were influenced by the freedom and exuberance
and began to expand the rules of Swiss design.
Geissbuhler explored the complexity of form,
rather than rigid simplicity.
And the layering of form and space.
His solutions merged motion and dimension
with information and concept.
At Basel, in Switzerland, Wolfgang Weingart explored
typography by questioning all of the rules.
Why was it wrong to change the weight
of a typeface mid-sentence?
Were there different ways to create hierarchy
with open letter spacing, angles and unexpected composition?
Weingart then used film positives and negatives
and typography to overlap information and texture.
He exposed the process and showed the half-tone docs,
cut lines, and typographic accidents.
After a series of presentations in the United States,
a new generation of designers went
to Basel to study with Weingart.
Dan Friedman, April Greiman and Willi Kunz
studied with Weingart, then returned to the United States.
Greiman moved to Los Angeles and integrated
a California energy into her work.
A promotion for the China Club
creates typographic three dimensional space.
Letter spacing, different weights and sizes,
suggest type and typographic elements
that are forward or more distant in space.
Willi Kunz's poster for Columbia University
maintains the language of Swiss modernism,
but introduces shape, pattern and three dimensional
space to clarify the message.
The result is a synthesis of refinement and order
with a vibrant energy and the unexpected.
Deborah Sussman's environmental design
for the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles
adopted many of the ideas of the New Wave:
an underpinning of Swiss modernism,
three dimensional typography,
and a preference for geometric shapes.
She added to this by running it
through a filter of vibrant color.
The color palettes were inspired from Mexican,
South American and Asian influences
rather than European models.
The New Wave movement combined the functionalism
of the Bauhaus, energy of Constructivism,
and the rigor of Swiss modernism.
The addition of radical experimentation,
expressive typography, and a high tech
color palette created the movement.
More importantly, it introduced a new approach
that accepted intuition and play.