In this pristine academic environment, the perpetually restless
Weingart began to question: Why does type need to be flush left and
ragged right? Why do paragraphs need to be indented? He didn’t want to
reject all that came before, just expand it. In 1968 the Advanced Course for
Graphic Design was started, and Weingart was offered a position on the
typography faculty. His contributions to graphic design’s lexicon are
considerable: wide letterspacing, layering of photographic and typographic
imagery, solid bands and blocks of reversed type, grids implied then
violated, underlining, unconventional mixing of type sizes and weights,
diagonal type, and using geometric shapes and typographic units as
illustrative devices—all elements that would later be adopted as
contemporary mannerisms. Is Weingart pleased? Hardly. He would
condemn this list as “design cream” that has been skimmed off and used as
disembodied fragments by designers who don’t think for themselves. “I
never intended to create a ‘style,’” Weingart said. He did intend to discover
a new visual attitude and method of experimentation based on a solid
teaching foundation.
Weingart’s posters for the Basel Kunstkredit (art fair) document
his investigations. The 1976/77poster is a hallmark of typographic and
spatial play, and visual proof of his philosophy that typography exists in a
triangular relationship between the design idea, typographic elements, and
printing technique. Photographic fragments of a building and interior
architecture allude to illusionistic space, a snippet of reality. The camera
lens image is photographic, too, but frontal and flattened in space. For
contrast Weingart used the tools of print technology, enlarged halftone dots
and moiré patterns, as aesthetic elements to interrupt the reading of the
“reality” of the photographic images and reinforce the true nature of the
poster—ink on paper.
Diagonals draw the viewer into the space, both through the
perspective of the architectural references and the directional nature of the
geometric shapes. Graphic devices, grids, and solid blocks of typography are
embedded in the graphic imagery, sometimes overlapping other images,
other times tucked behind. The effect is one of layering, or put another way,
of spatial dialogue between illusionistic three-dimensionality and the two-
dimensional activity of the surface. The result is disorienting, complicated,
and dynamic, but it is not chaotic. A solid vertical and horizontal axis
underpins the geometric thrusts and girds against the photographic allusions
to spatial depth, reminding the viewer of the surface plane. Weingart
tinkered with visual pathways, tested readability by partially obscuring
letterforms, and left the viewer with a nonlinear, holistic conglomeration.
Weingart is not a theorist, but a practitioner for whom technology
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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