Swiss Posters^227
Armin HofmannA successful advertising poster must be able to
be clearly viewed from a distance of one
hundred feet, suggesting that if such a
prominent image cannot instantaneously
attract the attention of harried passersby, then
even an exquisitely beautiful design is
ineffectual publicity. This idea has been tested
throughout the twentieth century with
methods ranging from the unambiguous
sachplakat(object poster) in the early 1900 s to
optically challenging psychedelic posters in the
late 1960 s. Some are effective with more and
others with less visual noise, but one thing is
certain: Every poster must have the kind of
graphic impact that intimate printed materials
do not. This impact is best experienced (for it
is indeed a visceral experience more than an
intellectual one) in the work of Swiss graphic
designer and teacher Armin Hofmann
(b. 1920 ). His posters have uniquely bridged the divide between representation
and abstraction. Few other designers have produced more vivid work, which
can be seen from one hundred feet or one foot away.
Hofmann created a great many poster icons over a six-decade-long
career. These include but are not limited to the multiple hands for the
Municipal Theater Basel, the huge “C” for the Cavellini Collection, the
spiraling ballerina for “Giselle,” and the bold apple for “William Tell.”
However, the appropriately titled Die Gute Form(Good Design), for
a 1954 exhibition at the Swiss Industries Fair in Basel, is perhaps the
designer’s quintessential contribution to the poster field. This stark
typographic design is at once concrete and abstract, simple and complex,
conventional and radical. It does everything a poster should do—attract the
eye, pique curiosity, impart a message—all, incidentally, without benefit of
an explicit picture or clever slogan.
Yet the headline Die Gute Formis, in fact, a picture, and the picture
is a headline that can be read either as words or symbols—or as both at a
single glance. To make this poster indelible, Hofmann designed geometrically