DESIGNING PROGRAMMES
Karl Gerstner
Karl Gerstner: DESIGNING PROGRAMMES. Teufen, AR: Arthur Niggli, 1964. First edition. Octavo. Flexible white paper boards printed in black. White cloth backstrip. 96 pp. Black and white and color illustrations throughout. INSCRIBED on title page: For Gene Federico / with the kindest regards. White covers lightly sun-toned. Cloth backstrip spotted. Light foxing early and late. A very good or better Association copy.
7.25 x 9.75 book with 96 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. Foreword by Paul Gredinger: the other "G" in the name of advertising agency GGK formed with Gerstner and Markus Kutter in 1962.
In the Akzidenz-grotesk essay Gerstner discusses the qualities of different sans-serifs. He is not too fond of the newer typefaces such as Helvetica [Max Miedinger] or Univers [Adrian Frutiger]. He considers them "too smooth." For Gerstner the good old "no-designer" Akzidenz-grotesk is still the best sans-serif -- he appreciates the "fresh liveliness" of its unrefined shapes, and its alleged immunity to short-lived fashions.
Includes an introduction by Paul Gerdinger and four essays by Gerstner: 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