Graphic Design Theory : Readings From the Field

Building on Success | 79

fI fth Independent pro Ject: typography

as endless repetItIon

Years after our explosive rebellion against the prevailing status of Swiss

typography and all the values that it had come to embody, my work, too,

became repetitive. Disheartening as it was, I had to admit that our school type

shop, although well stocked in metal type, rule lines, symbols, and ornaments,

flexible in all possible techniques, no longer offered creative potential, not

for me personally and not in the professional practice of design.

Since the invention of printing, typography had been the domain of

craftsmen. The artists and designers of the twenties and thirties, the so-called

pioneers of modern typography, El Lissitzky, Kurt Schwitters, Piet Zwart,

whose work anticipated a future direction in graphic design, perhaps came

to a similar dead end due to the inherent limitations of perpendicular

composition in lead typography.

In my case the crisis came at the beginning of the seventies when the

student unrest had subsided, when many of us were trying to envision a new

life. The renewed challenge to find other possibilities in my work, to find

my way out of a leaden typographic cage, seemed futile.

It was too soon to imagine the potential of layering lithographic films.

Nor could I predict that in the darkroom another world of surprise awaited:

transparency and superimposed dot screens.

From a feeling of nowhere to go, a low point and a standstill, I set repeated,

single type elements. The pictures conjured up many associations: the endless

expanse of the desert, the steps of archaeological sites, the discipline of my

apprenticeship, and, from childhood, the drudgery of survival in a postwar

economy and a report card with the failing grade that would never improve—

in Germany, the number 1. Lines that spanned a double-page spread reminded

me of first grade in Salem Valley and my practice notebook for handwriting.

The word “schön,” set in bold with two fine points above it, defined my idea of

beauty. The rows of Rs were elephants with their long trunks, a peaceable herd

roaming a dry river valley at the foot of a steep mountain massif. The cross,

the registration mark of the printer, was the intersection of north, south, east,

and west. The letter Y was a dichotomy, the arid desert strewn with colorful

tulips. Pages of bold points and vertical lines were abstractions of photographs

brought back from journeys in the Near East.

This phase of my work may well have been influenced by Serial Art, or by

Repetition Typography practiced in the class of Emil Ruder during the sixties.

The typeface Univers designed by Adrian Frutiger of Switzerland, a longtime

i wa

S motivated to provoke the S

todgy profe

SSion and to

Stretch the type Shop’

S capabilitie

S to the breaking point,

and, finally, to prove once again that typography iS an art.

wolfgang
weIngart
My Way
to Typography
2000