DESIGNING PROGRAMMES
Karl Gerstner
Karl Gerstner: DESIGNING PROGRAMMES. New York: Hastings House, 1968. New enlarged edition by D.Q. Stephenson [originally published by Arthur Niggli, 1964]. Octavo. White cloth stamped in black. Printed dust jacket. 112 pp. Black and white and color illustrations throughout. INSCRIBED by Gerstner. Top textblock edges dustly and spotted. Dust jacket lightly worn with a darkened spine. A couple of coin sized liquid spots to front jacket panel, with a Gerstner inked notation: Sorry! How cool is that? Small short closed tear on front bottom edge. A nearly fine copy in a very good dust jacket.
INSCRIBED by Gerstner on front free endpaper: “my respect / for coming / coursework programs: / K G.” Gerstner has also added the word Sorry! tot he front panel of the dust jacket to obviate an apparent mild coffee spill.
7.25 x 10 hardcover book with 112 pages illustrated in black and white and color. The design of the book is traditional Swiss Modern -- immaculately typeset and laid out on a consistent 2-column grid, a single type family [Akzidenz-grotesk] set with a minimum of scale and weight changes.
Gerstner's most important work includes: four essays and an introduction by Gerstner with an introduction to the introduction by Paul Gredinger. A detailed analysis of Gerstner's design methodolgies including: Programme as typeface, Programme as typography, Programme as picture and Programme as method.
In these essays, the author provides a basic introduction to his design methodology. Instead of set recipes, the method suggests a model for design in the early days of the computer era. The intellectual models it proposes, however, continue to be useful today. What it does not purvey is cut-and-dried, true-or-false solutions or absolutes of any kind - instead, it develops fundamental principles in an innovative and future-oriented way. The book is especially topical and exciting in the context of current developments in computational design, which seem to hold out the possibility of programmed design. With many examples from the worlds of graphic and product design, music, architecture, and art, it inspires the reader to seize on the material, develop it further, and integrate it into his or her own work.
"To describe a problem is part of the solution. This implies: not to make creative decisions as promoted by feeling but by intellectual criteria. The more exact and complete these criteria are, the more create the work becomes. The creative process is to be reduced to an act of selection. Designing means: to pick out determining elements and combining them." -- Karl Gerstner
Karl Gerstner (Swiss, 1930 – 2017) started his career with a foundation year at the Basel School of Arts and Crafts, and was then apprenticed to the studio of the advertising designer Fritz Bühler. There his supervisor was Max Schmid, who went on to head design at the pharmaceutical giant, Geigy, where the new Swiss graphic design developed as a house style.
Chance and enterprise gave Gerstner the finest teachers and the most inspiring and fruitful connections. He wasted none of them. He visited Cassandre in Paris and came to know Tschichold in Basel. He joined Hans Finsler’s photography course in Zurich. As the youngest member of the Swiss Werkbund design association, he met Max Bill and Alfred Roth, the veteran architect who edited the monthly Werk. Pressed by Gerstner to report more on Swiss graphic design, Roth gave the 25-year-old a whole issue of the magazine to edit and design. That November 1955 issue was a turning point. Swiss graphic design was presented, for the first time, as a logical development of Modernism. His design of Werk was radical, too. Gerstner used a complex grid to accommodate the varying proportions of the work reproduced and he ranged the text left, unjustified, – a novelty attacked by some of the pioneers.
The founding fathers of graphic design admired by Gerstner were all painters, more artists than designers. And he, too, has had a continuous career as an artist. His first book, published in 1957, was a survey of the school of concrete-constructive abstract painting to which he belongs. The small, square Kalte Kunst? [Cold Art?], as it was titled, included his guiding lights, Max Bill and Richard Paul Lohse. Bill was probably the earliest to devise controlling grids for organising text and pictures; Lohse had devised one for the monthly Bauen+Wohnen in the 1940s. As an element of their typographic grids as well as their paintings, both Bill and Lohse used the square.
The square generated the grid he devised in 1957 for Markus Kutter’s experimental novel, Schiff nach Europa [Ship to Europe]. It is an exercise in styles: conventional narrative; play script; conversation that becomes loud argument; newspaper journalism, etc. Gerstner’s typographic language varies dramatically, but is disciplined by the grid – rigorously imposed, but flexible in use – and the restriction to only grotesque fonts. In this example of ‘integral typography’, the type makes the image.
Gerstner and Kutter met when the latter joined Geigy as public relations officer in the late 1950s, and they worked together on publications for the firm’s 200th anniversary in 1958. The chief outcome was Geigy Today, the first comprehensive demonstration of the new graphic design. The square format book used all the techniques of information design that have become standard practice – charts, annotated photographs, diagrams (organigrams, Gerstner calls them). He set the type (all Akzidenz) in unjustified columns, the method he introduced at Geigy in 1954.
In 1955 Gerstner and Kutter had put together pamphlets on planning, as radical in their typography – long lines of Monotype grotesque bold – as in their ideas. In 1959, they established their own design office and published another square book, The New Graphic Art, a survey that expanded the account Gerstner had given in Werk.
The work of this ‘two-man creative team’ in the early 1960s is far from the stiff ‘Swiss’ stereotype. (With a new partner, Paul Gredinger, an architect whose chief interest was in electronic music, the firm became GGK in 1962.) While Gerstner inherited the Modernist European tradition, he also grasped the conceptual ideas of the American New Advertising, where the message is inseparable from the form. He identified this as ‘Integral Typography’ in his most influential book, Designing Programmes, a collection of essays published in 1963. The idea of permutations was central to this volume, which presented ‘a method and an approach’ to design. As in chemistry, ‘the formula creates the form’. The essence of his permutational thinking is distilled in Think Program, which accompanied his exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1973, and in Kompendium für Alphabeten (1972; later published as Compendium for Literates). Square, chunky and elegant, Compendium is an inventory of the permutations of type images available to designers. The possible styles and graphic treatments are exhaustively analysed.
As GGK grew to become a large advertising agency, Gerstner’s dreams of making a multi-disciplinary practice in the spirit of the Bauhaus faded. In 1968, to manage the huge Ford account in Germany, GGK moved to a new main office in Düsseldorf. The firm flourished, but by the beginning of the 1970s Gerstner withdrew into ‘semi retirement’. — Richard Hollis, Eye no. 43 vol. 11, 2002