Basel Kunstkredit 1976/77
Wolfgang Weingart“By itself, typography is as boring as hell,”
stated Wolfgang Weingart, the man who
stood Swiss typographic design on its head.
“What makes it exciting is how you interpret
it.” The tenets of Swiss design, later the
International Typographic Style, emerged
from the traditions of the Bauhaus, the New
Typography of the 1920 s and 1930 s, and de
Stijl. Sans-serif typography and objective
photography—photographs that do not
seduce or make exaggerated claims—were
positioned on an underlying mathematical
grid of verticals and horizontals in a
harmonic relationship derived from objective
and functional criteria.
Switzerland’s neutrality in World
War II provided a sanctuary for pioneering
designers Max Bill and Theo Balmer to
continue their explorations begun at the
Bauhaus. A booming postwar economy heightened industry’s demand
for publicity and the rationalist design ethic prospered, spreading to
Germany, Basel, and Zurich, and eventually to the design community at
large. Emil Ruder and Armin Hofmann began teaching at the Allegemeine
Gewerbeschule (Basel School of Design) the same year, 1947 , establishing
their own version of typographic principles based on a correct balance
between form and function, the sanctity of readability, and the belief in an
absolute and universal graphic expression.
After a three-year apprenticeship as a hand typesetter with a small
printer in Stuttgart, Wolfgang Weingart met Armin Hofmann by chance in
1963 when he inquired about his and Ruder’s classes at the School of
Design in Basel. Although he studied briefly with both teachers a year later,
Weingart considers himself an educational orphan, a failed student of
Ruder’s and underexposed to the teachings of Hofmann, who left for India
shortly after Weingart arrived. “I had a special understanding with Ruder
and he let me use the workshops whenever I wanted,” Weingart said in an
interview in Eye (April 1991 ).256