12/20/2014 Josef Mller-Brockmann: Principal Of The Swiss School

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Josef Mller-Brockmann: Principal Of TheSwiss School

Most people think of a yogurt brand when they hear, Swiss style. As designers, we may be

a bit more familiar with the Swiss school of design. Some call it the evolution of modern

design. Others may think of it as just a step to where design style is now. Both may be

correct.

Josef Mller-Brockmann (May 9th, 1914 August 30th, 1996) is considered one of the key

players in the Swiss School of international Style. When one considers the time of his career,

which included the Second World War, the Cold War and the growing influence of a Europe on

the mend from destruction and fear, he certainly influenced not only a design style that

influenced designers on a global scale. It was a time of rebirth for many nations that lay in

ruins, rebuilding and rethinking centuries of tradition that were forced to change due to the

brutality of war and cruelty.

Mller-Brockmann was more than just a man who sought to form what is now labeled the

Swiss School; Constructivism, De Still, Suprematism and the Bauhaus, all of which pushed his

designs in a new direction that opened doors for creative expressions in graphic design,

influenced him. Among his peers he is probably the most easily recognized when looking at

that period.

Perhaps his most recognized work was done for the Zurich Town Hall as poster

advertisements for its theater productions. The work is graphic, rather than illustrative. Some

critics say these posters created a mathematical harmony, which reflected the harmony of

music. If one studies posters before that time, they would probably all agree that these are a

bold and different way to play to visual messages dealing with music. Who would think of

such a graphic? Who would dare execute such work at that time? If you look at the jazz and

fusion albums in America at the time, you can see Mller-Brockmanns influence.

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The Grid System: Constrictive Or Freeing?

His design sense of the 1950s aimed to create posters that communicated with the masses.

This was no small feat as the pieces had to communicate across a language barrier, with

English, French, German and Italian speaking populations in Switzerland alone. It was the

harmony and simplicity of these pieces that influenced a post-war world that had lost the

sense of central nationalism and gained a lesson in the need for globalization. Mller-

Brockmann was soon established as the leading practitioner and theorist of the Swiss Style,

which sought a universal graphic expression through a grid-based design, purged of

extraneous illustration and subjective feeling.

The grid was the prioritization and arrangement of typographic and pictorial elements with the

meaningful use of color, set into a semblance of order, based on left-to-right, top-to-bottom.

According to Wikipedia, the grid system is, a two-dimensional structure made up of a series

of intersecting vertical and horizontal axes used to structure content. The grid serves as an

armature on which a designer can organize text and images in a rational, easy to absorb

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manner.

Despite that dry description, the page does go on to add, After World War II, a number of

graphic designers, including Max Bill, Emil Ruder, and Josef Mller-Brockmann, influenced by

the modernist ideas of Jan Tschicholds Die neue Typographie (The New Typography), began to

question the relevance of the conventional page layout of the time. They began to devise a

flexible system able to help designers achieve coherency in organizing the page. The result

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was the modern typographic grid that became associated with the International Typographic

Style. The seminal work on the subject, Grid systems in graphic design by Mller-Brockmann,

helped propagate the use of the grid, first in Europe, and later in North America.

In an interview with Eye Magazine in the winter of 1995 (a year before his death), Mller-

Brockmann spoke about what order meant to him:

Order was always wishful thinking for me. For 60 years I have produced disorder in files,

correspondence and books. In my work, however, I have always aspired to a distinct

arrangement of typographic and pictorial elements, the clear identification of priorities. The

formal organization of the surface by means of the grid, a knowledge of the rules that govern

legibility (line length, word and letter spacing and so on) and the meaningful use of color are

among the tools a designer must master in order to complete his or her task in a rational and

economic manner.

The KISS Method (Keep It Simple, Stupid).

Mller-Brockmann is recognized for his simple designs and his clean use of typography,

notably Akzidenz-Grotesk, shapes and colors, which inspires many graphic designers in the

21st century. As with the French posters in the 1890s, Mller-Brockmann and his peers also

attempted to attract customers and sell products with bold, simplicity. The posters that

served to attract an audience to events, especially music events and museum exhibitions

embraced the abstract geometrical shapes the style is noted for; but it is the public service

announcement posters from this time period that have been more noted than in many other

periods of design. The simple, clean and graphic messages were, as with the music event

posters, able to be understood by viewers with different languages.

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Whether you deal with print or digital design, the lesson of Mller-Brockmann is for simplicity

being more powerful than a mashup of too many elements. In a time of globalization with the

web, its imperative that the message be simple and instantly understood by those with

different languages and cultures. As with his poster designs, who could not get the message,

seeing a speeding vehicle careening towards a small child?

Mller-Brockmann published several books, including The Graphic Artist and His Problems

and Grid Systems in Graphic Design. These books provide an in-depth analysis of his work

practices and philosophies, and provide an excellent insight for graphic designers wishing to

learn more about the profession and creative thought. He spent most of his life working and

teaching, even into the early 1990s when he toured the US and Canada speaking about his

work.

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