Gottfried Honegger - Medomin (Geigy) advertising cards, c. 1954–1958

#graphic design

Angèle David-Guillou
Kourouma

Louise Paradis: That is interesting. Graphic design and type design are applied arts. I wonder about the university level question sometimes … I am doing a master class in Lausanne at the moment.

Wolfgang Weingart: Lausanne was a totally unknown school, everybody laughed about this school. And what Lausanne is today I don’t know exactly. There is no philosophy behind it, like most schools today, not only in Switzerland. There is no great philosophy anymore, like the Bauhaus or Basel. For me, the results now are not at an academic university level. They are very low level. The results in Hofmann’s time, in the 60s and 70s in the advanced class, were high level, academic level. But the stupid government here in Switzerland, they don’t see this kind of thing, they see only paperwork. That is not only here, it is everywhere. I don’t see one school in the world that is interesting.

interview

Work by the accomplished, Luzern based designer Daniel Peter

The Anti-Click

Read this for more on the practice of designing for punchlines.

I’m admittedly a bit over-vocal to my peers about how much I dislike [what I consider] the East Coast Graphic Design Tradition. As a student of fashion, musical sub-cultures, other cultures in general, nothing about Glaser or Rand’s work struck me as true. I felt appreciation for the formal qualities of their reductivism, yet alienated by what felt like packaged good feeling sung to an Us Versus Them tune. I refer to that [distinctly and unfortunately American] work as “one-liners”, partly because it stalls serious consideration, past maybe a few inches. Design is not and never was a mass duke-out to see who’s wittier and quicker in cheerfully solving X or Y. If its students see themselves as commodities in competition for the attention of creative directors and ad agency budgets, we continue to disservice meaningful collective dialogue and lock ourselves further into complacency. Long-term effects range from the literal (poorly balanced pay scales) to the less tangible but more grave (a skewed way of engaging with our surroundings and manufacture).

In light of the rather unfortunate decision made above, I return to this quote from Harsh’s post on The New Graphic. When you aren’t trying to design the punchline, you can come up with ethically sound ideas that are free from ego. I prefer this.

I’m admittedly a bit over-vocal to my peers about how much I dislike [what I consider] the East Coast Graphic Design Tradition. As a student of fashion, musical sub-cultures, other cultures in general, nothing about Glaser or Rand’s work struck me as true. I felt appreciation for the formal qualities of their reductivism, yet alienated by what felt like packaged good feeling sung to an Us Versus Them tune. I refer to that [distinctly and unfortunately American] work as “one-liners”, partly because it stalls serious consideration, past maybe a few inches. Design is not and never was a mass duke-out to see who’s wittier and quicker in cheerfully solving X or Y. If its students see themselves as commodities in competition for the attention of creative directors and ad agency budgets, we continue to disservice meaningful collective dialogue and lock ourselves further into complacency. Long-term effects range from the literal (poorly balanced pay scales) to the less tangible but more grave (a skewed way of engaging with our surroundings and manufacture).

In light of the rather unfortunate decision made above, I return to this quote from Harsh’s post on The New Graphic. When you aren’t trying to design the punchline, you can come up with ethically sound ideas that are free from ego. I prefer this.