Reading Graphic Design History

Image, Text, and Context

David Raizman

• Éditeur: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Année: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781474299381
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Design
• Sous-sujet: Design General

Reading Graphic Design History uses a series of key artifacts from the history of print culture in light of their specific historical contexts. It encourages the reader to look carefully and critically at print advertising, illustration, posters, magazine art direction and typography, often addressing issues of class, race and gender. David Raizman's innovative approach intentionally challenges the canon of graphic design history and various traditional understandings of graphic design. He re-examines 'icons' of graphic design in light of their local contexts, avoiding generalisation to explore underlying attitudes about various social issues. He encourages new ways of reading graphic design that take into account a broader context for graphic design activity, rather than broad views that discourage the understanding of difference and the means by which graphic design communicates cultural values. With a foreword by Steven Heller.

Chapter 1

Josef Müller-Brockmann: “schutzt das Kind!” and the Mythology of Swiss Design

Josef-Müller-Brockmann (1914–96) was one of a group of graphic designers who defined a “Swiss” or “International Typographic Style” after World War II. With a successful professional practice based in Zurich and a wide range of corporate and non-profit clients, as a teacher at the city’s Kunstgewerbeschule (1957–60), through exhibitions he helped to organize, as founding editor of the trilingual journal Neue Grafik together with Richard Lohse, Carlo Vivarelli, and Hans Neuberg (1958–65), and as an author through his own extensive publications (e.g., The Graphic Designer and his Design Problems [1961]; A History of Visual Communication [1971]; Grid Systems in Graphic Design [1981]), Müller-Brockmann occupies a privileged place in twentieth-century graphic design history, a position he played no small part in establishing himself through his own writings.

Among the designer’s best-known and frequently reproduced works is the offset poster “schutzt das Kind!” (mind the Child! or, protect the Child!) dating to 1952 and 1953, the winning design in a competition sponsored by the Automobile Club of Switzerland (ACS). The poster measures 127.5 × 90.5 cm (50 3/16 × 35 5/8 in., Figure 1.1), and a photo (Figure 1.2) shows how it was mounted on sidewalk stands (rather than a wall or kiosk) for viewing in Zurich by passing motorists.

FIGURE 1.1 (and color plate) Josef Müller-Brockmann, © ARS, NY. Poster, schützt das Kind! [Protect the Child!], 1953. Offset lithograph on wove paper, lined, 1275 × 905 mm (50 3/16 × 35 5/8 in.) Museum purchase from General Acquisitions Endowment Fund. 1999–46. Photo Credit: Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum/Art Resource, NY. Photo: Matt Flynn © Smithsonian Institution, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, NY, USA. Artists Rights Society

FIGURE 1.2 Josef Müller-brockmann, “schutzt das Kind!” (Protect the Child!), poster displayed on sidewalk, Zurich, 1953, Museum for Design, Zurich

The competition brief asked designers to illustrate the tagline “schutzt das Kind!” and was part of an ACS initiative to promote automobile safety that included a changing display of statistics and photographs reporting traffic accidents and deaths (Unfallbarometer—Accident Barometer) located in a prominent Zurich public square (Figure 1.3), also designed by Müller-Brockmann. Müller-Brockmann created a series of posters for the campaign in the early 1950s, and in subsequent years the designer and his office produced brochures and related print materials for the ACS (Purcell, 2006).

FIGURE 1.3 Josef Müller-brockmann, “Accident Barometer,” 1952, Paradeplatz, Zurich, commissioned by the Automobile Club of Switzerland (ACS), Zurcher Hochschule der Kunste ZhdK

Survey texts that mention or illustrate the poster focus heavily upon the technical refinement of its printing, due in no small measure to the perfection of the offset lithographic process after World War II in Switzerland, using finer half-tone screens to produce the rich, even tones of each print, most evident in the deep, almost soft, tactile black and deep gray areas on the matte paper surface in our example. The Swiss reputation for quality, dependability, and precision, in the manufacture of watches no less than in printing, was in turn part of the small nation’s identity and reputation internationally that persists to the present day. Through recent publications and conferences, Swiss scholars are lobbying to include Swiss graphic design on the “List of Intangible Cultural Heritage” through the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO; Lizcar et al., 2018).

Authors also note the design’s reductive arrangement of simple compositional units. This approach rejects drawing or illustration in favor of photography and employs a limited color palette, here including a horizontal yellow band at the bottom of the poster that draws attention to that area, the unprinted white space to the right of the motorcycle wheel that contrasts with and isolates the running child and emphasizes the disparity between him and the speeding wheel, and the use of the crisp sans serif Akzidenz Grotesk font in the upper left corner silhouetted against the cycle’s motor housing. The tension created by the unequal formal arrangement of asymmetrical abstract shapes, dominated by the aggressive dark triangle of the wheel at the left and its lighter, smaller counterpart to the right, the repetition of parallel diagonal lines that includes the outer edge of the wheel and shock absorber and the left contour of the running child, and overall simplicity of the composition produce a unified image with a striking and immediate impact upon the viewer. The canonical status of “schutzt das Kind!” results from its frequent reproduction not only in survey books but also its inclusion in exhibitions, for instance the “Meister der Plakatkunst” exhibition in Zurich in 1959, and in journals, including the very first issue of Neue Grafik in September, 1958 (Lizcar and Fornari, 2016).

A similar design strategy applies to other posters designed by Müller-Brockmann for the ACS series, though with less dramatic effect, for instance, “Überholen …? Im Zweifel nie!” (Overtake? If in doubt, never! Figure 1.4).

FIGURE 1.4 Josef Müller-Brockmann © ARS, NY. Überholen…? Im Zweifel nie! 1957. Offset lithograph, 50 1/2 × 35 1/2” (128 × 90 cm). Printer: Lithographie & Cartonnage A.G., Zürich. Purchase and partial gift of Leslie J. Schreyer. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY

Here the negative white space positions a smaller motorcyclist between as well as behind two automobiles, collapsing space and suggesting a tight squeeze. In addition to eliminating background distractions, the repetition of the circular shapes of rear-view mirrors, helmet, and headlights creates visual unity and concentration, but the rectangular rather than slanted shapes of the cars and cyclist are less dynamic than the raking diagonals of “schutzt das Kind!” and the situation “Überholen …” describes appears less immanently threatening.

What IS “Swiss Style”?

The technical perfection of “schutzt das Kind!,” its clean, reductive approach to design, and the active use of negative space are characteristics that inform our general understanding of Swiss design or a Swiss style after World War II. Survey texts and monographs have made this style or Swiss School a standard, even dominant, part of the history of modern twentieth-century graphic design. Here, for instance, is a passage from the introduction to post-World War II Swiss graphic design in Philip Meggs and Allston Purvis’s History of Graphic Design, now in its sixth edition:

During the 1950s a design movement emerged from Switzerland and Germany that has been called Swiss design, or, more appropriately, the International Typographic Style. The objective clarity of this design movement won converts throughout the world. It remained a major force for over two decades, and its influence continues today.

The visual characteristics of this style include a unity of design achieved by asymmetrical organization of the design elements on a mathematically constructed grid; objective photography and copy that present visual and verbal information in a clear and factual manner, free from the exaggerated claims of propaganda and commercial advertising; and use of sans-serif typography set in a flush-left and ragged-right margin configuration. The initiators of this movement believed sans-serif typography expressed the spirit of a more progressive age and that mathematical grids are the most legible and harmonious means for structuring information (Meggs/Purvis, 2016)

In Graphic Design: A Critical Guide, authors Johanna Drucker and Emily McVarish restate the basic elements of Swiss design, preferring “International Style” in order to emphasize its near-universal adoption as the accepted visual language for corporate communications, serving the expanding post-World War II national and multinational chemical, travel, communications, entertainment, pharmaceutical, and oil industries: “Visually, the International style was characterized by underlying grid structures, asymmetrical layouts, and sans serif type. It also favored straightforward, “objective” photography, geometric forms, and an almost total absence of decoration or illustration. … Clean, unfussy directness was the primary aim of this approach” (Drucker and McVarish, 2013).

But these and other sources do not present Swiss design, Swiss School, or International Typographic Style only as a set of formal choices and technical achievement: authors almost invariably point to the way in which the style communicates shared political and ethical beliefs, in particular the renunciation of manipulative techniques of persuasion in advertising and a commitment to social and public responsibility as professional values. Referring to Müller-Brockmann, Meggs/Purvis state the designer “sought an absolute and universal form of graphic expression through objective and impersonal presentation, communicating to the audience without the interference of the designer’s subject feelings or propagandistic techniques of persuasion.” The authors continue:

More important than the visual appearance of this work is the attitude developed by its early pioneers about their profession. These trailblazers defined design as a socially useful and important activity. Personal expression and eccentric solutions were rejected, while a more universal and scientific approach to design problem solving was embraced. In this paradigm, designers defined their roles not as artists but as objective conduits for spreading important information between components of society [italics added]. Achieving clarity and order is the ideal (Meggs/Purvis, 2016)

And yet, when using the term “objective,” authors seem to conflate technical practice with emotional restraint, as if “objectivity” was the natural, inevitable result of applying the formal principles of the Swiss style and the use of photography. Indeed, in his own History of Visual Communication (1971), Müller-Brockmann stated that “objectively informative designs are a socio-cultural task.” And in commenting on the program at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich, Müller-Brockmann tells his readers he has developed an “objectified course of training,” that visual communication is a “means of conveying objective facts [my italics],” giving designers the ability to cope with “highly complex problems of human society.” The section of his survey devoted to graphic design after the Second World War bears the subtitle “The Development of Objective Visual Communication after World War II.”

Ethics, Advertising, Objectivity, and Politics

The relationship between Swiss style and ethics applies most directly and clearly to graphic design for advertising. Stemming from a long-standing mistrust of the advertising industry’s goal of promoting sales and profits by exaggerating or misrepresenting the truth, designers and promoters of Swiss design renounced, both in practice and in professional writing, persuasive techniques that associated products with personal fulfilment and status, emphasizing instead “objectivity,” translating visually as presenting commodities plainly through the use of “object” photography rather than employing techniques based upon consumer psychology and motivational research to play upon customers’ hopes or fears. The designers who defined and practiced Swiss design believed that it was their professional responsibility to avoid the excesses of consumer-led advertising, long before government regulation and consumer activism (e.g. the Consumer Protection Organization of the Federal Trade Commission in the United States) assumed such a role politically or legislatively. In his History of Visual Communication, Müller-Brockmann wrote:

The way it [objective information] is tackled highlights the position of the designer in society. Does he feel responsible to society? Does he want to provide reliable information or to doctor facts? The business world along with the advertising agencies use their resources, including sometimes those of science, to speed up and promote the sale of goods. Often for the benefit of the producer. An intention which is, however, resisted by people who think for themselves [italics added]. They [the thinkers] expect impartial information about what comes on the market. They take a critical look at what they are offered. (Müller-Brockmann, 1971)

Equally telling is a passage on the subject of advertising in the 1956 book The New Graphic Art, by Basel-based artist and graphic designer Karl Gerstner. Illustrating examples of women’s shoe advertisements, he contrasted a Lord & Taylor advertisement featuring two photographed views of a shoe with an I. Miller ad (Andy Warhol provided illustrations for I. Miller ads in the 1950s) in which a women’s leg is photographed wearing a shoe, commenting:

One way of advertising shoes is to show a picture of them. Another is to make the picture promise the fulfillment of a wish: If you buy my shoes you will have beautiful legs (the shoe itself seems to have become a minor consideration). It is all rather like a fairy story and nobody troubles to check the truthfulness of such promises. (Gerstner, 1959; see also the advertisements for women’s stockings advertisements below in chapter 5, Figures 5.24 and 5.25)

Examples of advertising illustrated in Müller-Brockmann’s History of Visual Communication also support this approach, whose origins are easily traced to the “Sachplakat” (“Object poster”) pioneered by German designer Lucien Bernhard (1883–1972) in the early twentieth century. The journal Neue Grafik, beginning in 1958, echoed these views in numerous articles, promoting an ethical component in professional practice that resisted commercial and popular pressure and emphasized the graphic designer’s “cultural responsibility,” most clearly seen in advertising, where understatement and restraint reigned. Concluding an article from the trilingual journal Neue Grafik in 1959 titled “The Graphic Designer and his Training,” designer and teacher Robert Gessner repeated the saying “moderation in all things.” And in an article in Neue Grafik from 1959, Richard Lohse remarked, “This responsibility [of the designer to culture] is particularly obvious when the creative designer opposes the customary practice of persuading by false means and supports the opinion that he must convince the buying public by purely objective means [italics added].”

Müller-Brockmann’s critical position toward advertising incorporated a political dimension that identifies advertising more generally with the dangers of manipulating public opinion. In the United States mistrust of the advertising industry intensified with the rise of television in the 1950s, with the sensationalist writings of journalist and social critic Vance Packard (1914–96), and with threats of congressional action to impose taxes on advertising or to eliminate corporate tax deductions for advertising as business expenses (see chapter 5, p. 174). In his popular 1957 book The Hidden Persuaders, Packard use...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Josef Müller-Brockmann: “schutzt das Kind!” and the Mythology of Swiss Design
• 2 Koloman Moser’s Thirteenth Secession Exhibition Poster (1902): Anatomy of a Work of Viennese Graphic Design
• 3 Cassandre and Dubonnet: Art Posters and Publicité in Interwar Paris
• 4 Frank Zachary at Holiday: Travel, Leisure, and Art Direction in Post-World War II America
• 5 Food, Race, and the “New Advertising”: The Levy’s Jewish Rye Bread Campaign 1963–1969
• 6 Graphic Design and Politics: Thomas Nast and the “TAMMANY TIGER LOOSE”
• 7 The Politics of Learning: Dr. John Fell and the Fell Types at Oxford University in the Later Seventeenth Century
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint