The Swiss Grid

Before The Grid

Most posters would also have to be redesigned in one or more of the country’s four languages (German, French, Italian, and Romansh) to meet governmental rules on advertising—an artistic challenge as many translated words or phrases took up different quantities of space on a page. By the late 1950s, however, this illustrational style had run its course. Idyllic imagery seemed dishonest in the postwar years, and companies within a newly unified Europe sought to access a growing international market as efficiently and cohesively as possible.

PKZ, 1924, A. Ernst Kretschmann (1897–1941), Poster House Permanent Collection

Primarily a military painter, this is Kretschmann’s only known poster.

Founded in 1881, PKZ was Switzerland’s first men’s department store and produced some of the best posters within the country. This design is no exception, combining a touch of Art Deco with classic illustrational techniques.

Text was typically expressive and artistically integrated into the compositions.

PKZ, 1923, Otto Baumberger (1889–1961), Poster House Permanent Collection

Baumberger is one of Switzerland’s most important and prolific graphic designers, creating over 200 posters during his career.

This poster is a marvelous example of the Sachplakat (Object Poster) style in which a product is presented in a simple close-up with little additional visual material. The assumption is that the product can sell itself.

Baumberger ingeniously uses the tag on the coat to indicate the brand, leaving no need for additional promotional text.

Before the development of the grid, Switzerland had already embraced a cohesive aesthetic that set it apart from the rest of Europe. Around 1914, poster sizes within the country were standardized (known as the Weltformat or World Format poster) and rules were introduced establishing where posters could be officially displayed in public. Designers excelled at the classic illustrational poster, promoting tourism through sun-dappled landscapes and products through handsome renderings of goods.

Turnfest in Basel, 1912, Eduard Renggli (1863–1921), Poster House Permanent Collection

First held in 1832, the Federal Turnfest in Switzerland is the country’s largest sporting event, focusing primarily on gymnastics and other athletic feats.

Renggli’s poster shows the wispy, atmospheric treatment of line that dominated Swiss design in the 1910s.

Why Switzerland?

1939

As a neutral territory, Switzerland was one of the few European countries to emerge relatively unscathed from World War II. Unlike its neighboring countries, its infrastructure had not been destroyed, its citizens had not been witness to mass bloodshed, and its economy had been steadily recovering since the crash in 1929.

Foreign artists and innovators saw the country as a haven, taking up teaching positions in Zürich and Basel where their forward-thinking ideas were nurtured. While the rest of the world recovered, Switzerland had the luxury of focusing on cultural growth.

1941

The government and professional organizations started sponsoring design competitions like The Best Swiss Poster, touring the winning designs both at home and abroad. Museums hosted exhibitions about new Swiss design, inviting the artists to lecture and create catalogs and posters for the shows.

1944

Design publications like Graphis (1944) also flourished, introducing Swiss graphics to the world through trilingual volumes in English, German, and French.

Most of the winners of these competitions, as well as the people creating the exhibition posters and new publications, were professors at the two biggest design schools in Switzerland—the Allgemeine Gewerbeschule (later the Schule für Gestaltung) in Basel and the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zürich—where grid-based design was being developed and taught. These numerous outlets allowed this particularly Swiss style to spread and saturate the international design community with unprecedented speed.

1948

By the late 1940s, homegrown companies around the world with an eye for the increasingly international market wanted recognizable brand identities that set them apart from the competition. This crisp, easy-to-understand means of communication was at once particularly “Swiss” and adaptable to any country. And so these brands turned to the professors in Zürich and Basel to define a new advertising age.

Designers

Many of the influential Swiss designers
can be divided into two basic schools—
Basel and Zürich.

The Zürich and Basel camps of Swiss design can both be traced back to a single man: Ernst Keller. Teaching at the Kunstgewerbeschule from 1918–56, he is often referred to as the Father of Swiss Style, having directly trained most of the key players who would go on to define this movement. While he did not explicitly promote the use of a grid system, his teaching methods put communication first, focusing on typography over illustration.

At the same time, postwar Zürich was a hotbed of artistic activity: Bauhaus students like Max Bill promoted Concrete art that, like De Stijl and Constructivism, emphasized abstract geometry, while Jan Tschichold’s highly praised 1928 publication The New Typography glorified asymmetry and photomontage in graphic communication. These landmark influences put some of Keller’s students in the perfect position to develop a specific design tool that stressed clarity and communication over all else: the flexible grid.

Basel

Looser adherence to the grid
High contrast photography
Artistically placed lettering
Experimentation with Univers

Basel

Emil Ruder

Emil Ruder (1914–70)

Ruder studied design at the Kunstgewerbeschule Zürich, and was heavily influenced by the Bauhaus masters. In 1942, he became the first of the new generation of design professors to teach at the Allgemeine Gewerbeschule Basel.

Ruder emphasized clarity through typography and was considered to be the most important mind in the field after Jan Tschichold.

By the late 1940s, he had formed a strong relationship with fellow professor Armin Hofmann, collaborating with him on many posters that would become icons of the Swiss movement.

In 1967, Ruder wrote the trilingual Typographie, a basic manual on type design that became one of the most popular and influential books on Swiss Style. It is still used today.

Hermann Eidenbenz

Hermann Eidenbenz (1902–93)

Eidenbenz studied and worked with Ernst Keller in Zürich before teaching at the Kunstgewerbe in Magdeburg alongside Julius Klinger. In 1932, he opened a design studio in Basel, becoming one of the first figures in the field to describe himself as a “graphic designer.” He would also teach at the Allgemeine Gewerbeschule from 1940–43.

He started to explicitly use grid systems in his work as early as 1947.

Armin Hofmann

Armin Hofmann (1920–2020)

One of the most prolific and prominent teachers of the Swiss Style, Hofmann began his career in Zürich before taking a position in 1947 at the Allgemeine Gewerbeschule Basel where he taught alongside Emil Ruder and further developed his design philosophy.

He traveled extensively outside of Switzerland, taking up teaching positions in Philadelphia, New Haven, and Ahmedabad, India. An overwhelming number of his students would go on to become leaders in the design field.

His aesthetic emphasized harmony among point, line, and plane in two-dimensional compositions, highlighting contrast and tension between forms. While he used flexible grid systems to create his posters, he did not rigidly adhere to them.

Karl Gerstner

Karl Gerstner (1930–2017)

Trained as a typographer, Gerstner studied under Emil Ruder in Basel. He opened his own studio in 1949, and in 1963 would become one of the three founders of GGK, one of the most important advertising agencies in Switzerland.

His writings on typography and flexible gridsystems (which he called “programmes”) would push and define the style more than those of any other designer. His grid systems are highly complex and innovative.

He believed in the notion of “integral typography,” in which the message and the form of the type are codependent, operating as one unit in order to be properly understood.

Fridolin Müller

Fridolin Müller (1926–2006)

Müller trained at the Allgemeine Gewerbeschule in Basel under Armin Hofmann and Emil Ruder from 1945–1950. He briefly replaced Karl Gerstner as lead designer for the international pharmaceutical company Geigy before moving to Zürich to open his own studio.

In 1965, he taught at the National Design Institute in Ahmedabad, India. He would go on to teach at the Philadelphia College of Art (now The University of the Arts).

Robert Büchler

Robert Büchler (1914–2005)

Büchler studied at the Allgemeine Gewerbeschule Basel before becoming a typography professor there. Obsessed with type, he was on the cutting edge of advances in the field, introducing phototypesetting to the curriculum that allowed for greater manipulation of letterforms.

Ruth Pfalzberger

Ruth Pfalzberger (b. 1949)

Pfalzberger studied under Armin Hofmann at the Allgemeine Gewerbeschule Basel before opening her own design studio. She produced work with Karl Domenic Geissbühler, a student of Keller’s and one of the most important contemporary Swiss posterists, for many years.

She was the in-house designer for the Department of Chemistry at the University of Basel.

Markus Kutter

Markus Kutter (1925–2005)

After studying in Basel, Kutter joined the international chemical company Geigy in 1953, where he helped shape the now-legendary information department that spread Swiss Style around the world.

In 1959, he co-founded GGK along with Karl Gerstner and Paul Gredinger.

Zürich

Strict adherence to the grid
Less photography
More reliance on prominent text
Preference for Akzidenz-Grotesk

Zürich

Josef Müller-Brockmann

Josef Müller-Brockmann (1914–96)

Perhaps the figure with the most recognizable name from this period, Müller-Brockmann studied, worked, and eventually taught in Zürich where he set the standard for how the world viewed grid systems associated with Swiss Style.

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.

After he moved into a shared studio with the photographer Ernst A. Heiniger in 1954, Müller-Brockmann began adding photography into his posters. He stopped this practice in the early 1960s in an effort to rid his designs of all subjectivity.

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.

Paul Rand believed so strongly in Müller-Brockmann’s work that he appointed him the European design consultant for IBM in 1966.

Richard Paul Lohse

Richard Paul Lohse (1902–88)

After working under Ernst Keller at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zürich, Lohse joined the advertising agency of Max Dalang, where he worked alongside Hans Neuburg. In 1937, he became one of the cofounders of Allianz, the Association of Modern Swiss Artists, and in 1954 he took a leadership position at the Swiss Werkbund (the organization responsible for the many “Good Design” exhibitions that traveled throughout Switzerland and abroad).

As early as 1953, Lohse began incorporating grid systems into his work, making him one of its earliest practitioners and pioneers.

Along with Müller-Brockmann, Neuburg, and Vivarelli, he co-founded the landmark design publication Neue Grafik, which promoted the design vision of the Zürich camp.

Ernst Hiestand

Ernst Hiestand (b. 1935)

Trained at Zürich’s Kunstgewerbeschule, Hiestand would return to become the Head of the Visual Communications Department. From 1960–1981, he operated a private firm with Ursula Hiestand. In 1972, they redesigned the Swiss bank notes as well as the wayfinding signage for the city of Zürich’s transit department that is still used today.

Hans Neuburg

Hans Neuburg (1904–83)

Neuburg studied under Orell Füssli before opening his own design studio in Zürich. A prolific writer on the topic of graphic design, he would go on to co-found the journal Neue Grafik as well as publish numerous important design books.

Carlo Vivarelli

Carlo Vivarelli (1919–86)

Vivarelli studied under Keller at the Kunstgewerbeschule Zürich before moving to Paris to apprentice under the legendary Art Deco poster designer Paul Colin. Upon returning to Switzerland, he served as a commercial designer for companies like Electrolux, Roche, and Philips.

He also co-founded Neue Grafik with other members of the Zürich school.

Nelly Rudin

Nelly Rudin (1928–2013)

After studying in Basel, Rudin created design for the chemical company Geigy before moving to Zürich to work for Ernst Heiniger and Josef Müller-Brockmann. At a time when only ten women were part of the Verband Schwizerischer Grafiker (the professional organization for Swiss designers), Rudin found notable success in the field, opening her own firm in 1958.

Gottfried Honegger

Gottfried Honegger (1917–2016)

Honegger both studied and taught at the Kunstgewerbeschule Zürich before opening a design studio with his wife, the illustrator Warja Lavater. Between 1955–1958, he was the Art Director at the chemical company Geigy—a brand that shaped the conversation about the corporate use of modern design.

Aldo Calabresi

Aldo Calabresi (1930–2004)

A student of Keller’s, Calabresi studied typography at the Kunstgewerbeschule Zürich before moving to Italy to take up a position at Studio Boggeri, the leading modernist design studio in Italy since its founding in 1933.

While he worked for many iconic brands over the years, he is best known for creating the latest corporate identity for Alfa Romeo.

Rosmarie Tissi

Rosmarie Tissi (b. 1937)

Tissi started her education in Zürich before apprenticing under Siegfried Odermatt, with whom she would eventually set up a design studio. She would ultimately push the boundaries of modernist Swiss design, breaking the grid in her later work as she became influenced by the experiments of Wolfgang Weingart and others.

What If We Altered The Grid?