Coming Out Swiss

by Anne Herrmann

  Few topics place Zürich in the same company as Amsterdam, Berlin, New York, and London, the cities featured by the documentary as places to have conversations with designers. Switzerland is the first country to have its passport professionally designed. The Swiss Railway Station Clock, designed in 1955, has replaced the cuckoo clock, at least on the wrists of those who venture into the Schweizer Heimatwerk, which has been selling contemporary Swiss handicrafts since 1930. The “Swiss style” in graphic design has its origins in the 1920s and its heyday in the 1960s, when it reaches its apogee as the international style. It replaces Expressionism with Neue Sachlichkeit. It says, “Out with symmetry, ornamentation and drawing”; it says, “In with white space, plain letter forms, and photography.” It is the graphic designer who gives visual character to modern life; he (mostly) is neither printer nor painter, nor simply commercial artist. He is anonymous rather than individualistic; he is mathematical rather than intuitive; he organizes essential information without provoking emotional sensations. He relies on strength and economy, the square and the circle, typefaces made by machine, such as Helvetica, placed at an angle, interrupting spatial voids. He uses letters in lower case, for simplicity and because their forms are richer than those of capitals. Besides, German nouns are capitalized, and thus it becomes a radical act.

  Design organizes, simplifies, creates order. It relies on an austere geometry for clarity and legibility. It is self-explanatory. It unites art and industry in the name of public service, that is, getting people on and off trains, in and out of airports, to the drugs they might need, to the concerts they might want to attend. There is the Geigy (as in the pharmaceutical) style, which comes out of Basel and relies more on the typeface Univers, and the style that comes out of Zürich, insisting on Helvetica, more constructivist and seemingly colder. Every style moves, eventually, from originality to orthodoxy.

  “Yet the graphic design and typography developed in Switzerland in the middle years of the twentieth century was a template used and adapted by designers for fifty years. Its origin was pan-European. Its consummation and achievements were Swiss. But now it is justly described as an International Style” (Hollis, Swiss Graphic Design). It is everywhere, and nowhere, which is why, occasionally, it needs to come out Swiss, and once again find itself on a map.

  Bibliography

  General

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  Prologue

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  The Alp(s)

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