According to Richard Hollis in his book Swiss Graphic Design. The Origins and Growth of an International Style, 1920-1965 says Modern design began in the nineteenth century with artists looking for a new role in industrialised society. It wasn’t until after the First World War these artists brought about a revolution in the design of print.
This style was introduced as New Typography which stopped using ornament and drawn illustration and in came white space plain letterforms and photographs. (Hollis, 2006).
The International Typographic Style, also known as the Swiss Style, is a graphic design style that emerged in Russia, the Netherlands, and Germany in the 1920’s and was further developed by designers in Switzerland during the 1950s and became the foundation for many of the graphic styles in the world by the 1970’s
The style took references and elements from Bauhaus, De Stijl and New Typography and these were used to great effect in the works of the pioneers of Swiss Style.
The style began from an aspiration to represent information objectively, free from the influence of associated meaning. The International Typographic style evolved as a modernist graphic movement that sought to convey messages clearly and in a universally straightforward manner. [reference]
It consisted of a grid which provided a skeleton that enabled designers to construct designs that consisted of an overall orderly and unified structure. They also used sans serif typefaces set in a flush left and ragged right format and used large black and white photography as a source for imagery rather than drawn illustrations because of its ability to make a true record of the subject.
The overall style ensured that the designs created were simple, tightly structured and easy to read. These grids are still in use today in both poster design, publishing and web design.
This graphic design technique based on grid-work that began in the 19th century became the basis for the development of the foundation course at the Basel School of Design in 1908. Ten years later Ernst Keller a pioneer of the style became a professor at the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Arts and Crafts) in Zurich and began developing a graphic design and typography course.
Keller did not teach a specific style to his students, but rather taught a philosophy of style that dictated “the solution to the design problem should emerge from its content.” This idea was a reaction to previous artistic processes that focused on “beauty for the sake of beauty” or “the creation of beauty as a purpose in and of itself”. [reference]
Keller’s work used simple geometric forms, vibrant colours and evocative imagery to reinforce the meaning behind each design.
After the Second world war the Swiss style was refined at two design schools in Switzerland, one in Basel led by Armin Hofmann and Emil Ruder, and the other in Zurich under the leadership of Joseph Muller-Brockmann. Both had studied with Ernst Keller at the Zurich School of Arts and Crafts before WWII, where the principles of the Bauhaus and Jan Tschichold’s New Typography were taught.
The new style became widely synonymous with the “look” of many Swiss cultural institutions which used posters as advertising vehicles. Hofmann’s series for the Basel State Theatre and Muller-Brockmann’s for Zurich’s Tonhalle are two of the most famous.
After World War II international trade began to increase and relations between countries grew steadily stronger. Typography and design were crucial to helping these relationships progress using clarity, objectivity, region-less glyphs, and symbols became essential to communication between international partners. International Typographic Style found its niche in this communicative climate and expanded further beyond Switzerland, to America. The emigration of the German Bauhaus school of design to Chicago in 1937 brought a “mass-produced” minimalism to America.
Notable names in mid-century modern design include Adrian Frutiger, designer of the typefaces Univers and Frutiger; Paul Rand, who, from the late 1930’s until his death in 1996, took the principles of the Bauhaus and applied them to popular advertising and logo design, helping to create a uniquely American approach to European minimalism while becoming one of the principal pioneers of the subset of graphic design known as corporate identity; and Josef Müller-Brockmann, who designed posters in a stark yet accessible manner typical of the 1950s and 1960s.
The new style was perfectly suited to the increasingly global post war marketplace. Corporations needed international identification and global events such as the Olympics called for solutions which the Typographic Style could provide.
The 1950s the introduction of International Typographic Style elements into sans-serif font families such as Univers came about. Univers paved the way for Max Miedinger and collaborator Edouard Hoffman to design the typeface Neue Haas Grotesk, which would be later renamed Helvetica.
The story of Helvetica began in the autumn of 1956 in the small Swiss town of Münchenstein. This is where Eduard Hoffmann, managing director of the Haas Type Foundry, commissioned Max Miedinger to draw a typeface that would unseat a popular family offered by one his company’s competitors.
Miedinger, who was an artist and graphic designer came up with a design based on Hoffmann’s instructions, and by the summer or 1957, produced the new sans serif typeface which was given the name “Neue Haas Grotesk.” Simply translated this meant “New Haas Sans Serif.”
The Stempel type foundry, which was the parent company of Haas, decided to offer the design to its customers in Germany, where Stempel was based. The company, however, felt it would be too difficult to market a new face under another foundry’s name and looked for one that would embody the spirit and heritage of the font. The two companies settled on “Helvetica,” which was a close approximation of “Helvetia,” the Latin name for Switzerland. (https://www.fonts.com/font/linotype/helvetica/story) 2020.
The goal with Helvetica was to create a pure typeface that could be applied to longer texts and that was highly readable. The typeface was first used in a periodical publication in 1959 titled “New”
The format of the journal represented many of the important elements of the style and was published internationally, therefore spreading the movement beyond Switzerland’s borders.
One of the first American designers to integrate Swiss design with his own was Rudolph de Harak. The influence of International Typographic Style on his works can be seen in his many book jacket designs for McGraw-Hill publishers in the 1960s.
Each jacket shows the book title and author, often aligned with a grid—flush left, ragged-right. One striking image covers most of the jacket illustrating the theme of the particular book.
From the early 60s International Typographic Style was embraced by corporations and institutions in America and has been used effectively for the past sixty years.
Helvetica has been and continues to be the typographical choice for many international corporations and government departments. They use it because of its easy to read and has become an intrinsic part of their brand communication.
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