GRAPHIC DESIGN
Basle School of Arts and Crafts
Kunstgewerbeschule Basel
Ecole des Arts et Métiers de Bâle
Emil Ruder, Armin Hofmann [text], Kurt Hauert [Designer]
Emil Ruder, Armin Hofmann [text], Kurt Hauert [Designer]: GRAPHIC DESIGN [Basle School of Arts and Crafts / Kunstgewerbeschule Basel / Ecole des Arts et Métiers de Bâle]. Basle: Pharos Verlag, 1967. First edition [Schriften des Gewerbemuseums Basel Nr. 6]. Text in English, German and French. Octavo. Printed dust jacket over plain self wrappers. 78 pp. Black and white student and staff work examples throughout. Text by Emil Ruder and Armin Hofmann. Book design by Kurt Hauert. Title page loose and laid in, otherwise a fine copy.
4.85 x 8.25 softcover book with 78 pages and many black and white illustrations from studies by the author or students at AGS Basle.
The Swiss Style (also known as International Typographic Style) was developed in Switzerland in the 1950s. This style was defined by the use of sans-serif typefaces, and employed a page grid for structure, producing asymmetrical layouts. By the 1960s, the grid had become a routine procedure. The grid came to imply the style and methods of Swiss Graphic Design. Ruder demonstrated a grid of nine squares as the basis for different sizes of image. There are 24 possible positions and shapes of image.
Also stressed was the combination of typography and photography as a means of visual communication. The primary influential works were developed as posters, which were seen to be the most effective means of communication.
Emil Ruder (Swiss, 1914 – 1970) was a Swiss typographer and graphic designer, who with Armin Hofmann joined the faculty of the Schule für Gestaltung Basel (Basel School of Design).
He is distinguishable in the field of typography for developing a holistic approach to designing and teaching that consisted of philosophy, theory and a systematic practical methodology. He expressed lofty aspirations for graphic design, writing that part of its function was to promote 'the good and the beautiful in word and image and to open the way to the arts' (TM, November 1952 Issue). He was one of the major contributors to Swiss Style design. He taught that typography's purpose was to communicate ideas through writing, as well as placing a heavy importance on Sans-serif typefaces. No other designer since Jan Tschichold was as committed as Ruder to the discipline of letterpress typography or wrote about it with such conviction.
Ruder was trained as a typesetter in Basel (1929-1933), and studied in Paris from 1938-1939. Ruder began his education in design at the age of fifteen when he took a compositor's apprenticeship. By his late twenties, he began attending the Kunstgewerbeschule Zürich where the principles of Bauhaus and Tschichold's new typography were taught.
Ruder first began teaching in 1942 at the Allgemeine Gewerbeschule in the Swiss city of Basel. There, he was in charge of typography for trade students. He became the head of the Department of Apprentices in Applied arts by 1947. In 1947 Ruder met the artist-printer Armin Hofmann. Ruder and Hoffman began a long period of collaboration. Their teaching achieved an international reputation by the mid-1950s. By the mid-1960s their courses were maintaining lengthy waiting lists. He was a contributing writer and editor for Typografische Monatsblätter (Typographic Monthly), which was a popular trade publication of the time. In 1946, his design was unsuccessful in the competition for the cover design of Typographische Monatsblätter.
During the post war years when, in almost every field of applied art, there was still no sign of transition to a new form of expression better fitted to the times, Emil Ruder was one of the first pioneers to discard all of the conventional rules of traditional typography and to establish new laws of composition more in accord with the modern era. In spite of his bent for pictorial thinking, he was never tempted to indulge in merely playful designs in which the actual purpose of printing - legibility - would be lost. Ruder's insistence that the primary aim of typography was communication did not exclude aesthetic effects. Contrast was one of his methods. He was essentially devoted to the craft of letterpress printing.
From 1946, Emil Ruder slowly emerged in Typografische Monatsblätter as an exponent of Modernism. Between 1957 and 1959 he contributed a series of four articles with the title 'Wesentliches' (Fundamentals): 'The Plane', 'The Line', 'The Word' and 'Rhythm'. They formed the basis of his thinking, summed up in 1967 in the book Typography.
In 1952, Schweizer Graphische Mitteilungen (SGM) fused with Revue Suisse de I'Imprimerie and Typographische Monatsblätter into a single monthly publication known by the initials TM.Emil Ruder was among the chief figures in the new magazine, and was a key force in typographical thinking. Three articles, in February 1952, established Ruder as a supporter of radical change. In January 1952, the first issue of the combined magazines retained Times as the text typeface; He introduced Monotype in the February issue that included his Bauhaus article.
After twenty-five years of teaching, Ruder published a heavily illustrated book capturing his ideas, methods and approach. The book, Typographie: A Manual for Design, represents a critical reflection on Ruder’s teaching and practice as well as a lifetime of accumulated knowledge. Other than publishing his book Typographie, he is known for his use of the grid system in Swiss Style design as well as his poster designs.
Here is Rick Poynor’s AIGA Medalist essay: “If the passionate loyalty of former students is any indication, Armin Hofmann (Swiss, 1920 – 2020) is one of the most exceptionally influential teachers the field of graphic design has seen. He is also a designer of great accomplishment, a leading member of a remarkable generation of Swiss practitioners whose work and thinking continues to have a determining effect on the international understanding of graphic design. There is, however, nothing doctrinaire or circumscribed about Hofmann’s Swissness. His insights and practice transcend any sense of nationality or “school” and attain a level that many of those who experienced the challenge of studying under his tutelage would regard as elemental. A significant number of those students—among them Kenneth Hiebert, April Greiman, Robert Probst, Steff Geissbuhler, Hans-Ulrich Allemann, Inge Druckrey and the late Dan Friedman—went on to become leading designers and educators themselves.
For Hiebert, author of Graphic Design Sources, who studied in Hofmann’s graphic design class in Basel from 1960 to 1964, he is “a person that radically changed me and my life.” “Wait till you get into Hofmann’s class . . . it’ll be like starting all over again,” a foundation course teacher warned him. “So it was,” Hiebert writes in Armin Hofmann: His Work, Quest and Philosophy, “because Armin Hofmann didn’t let you merely utilize what you already knew. You had to strip that away, too, to immerse yourself into a new problem.” Only at the end of this prolonged rite of passage, Hiebert recalls, after everything superficial had been stripped away, would the student arrive at a piece of work that was legitimately subjective.
The memories of Hofmann’s students evoke a powerful sense of his presence in the classroom. Everyone remembers him as a teacher of few words. “His charisma and energy were balanced with patience,” says Jerry Kuyper, who studied in Hofmann’s advanced class. “He believed in the individual’s ability to discover and create, which enabled him to often just stand back and watch.” Hiebert describes his “incessant roving, questioning, thinking-ahead eyes.” For Hofmann, the process of discovery was vital, however long it might take. He never imposed artificial deadlines; a project was only finished when the student had arrived at a satisfactory resolution. In this atmosphere, the smallest direction, a hand gesture to suggest a line of visual development, could prove decisive. “Sometimes it was simply a touch on the shoulder and him saying, ‘Ja, ja, just keep going.’ This little encouragement would do wonders and give the necessary confidence to go on,” says Allemann, a student from 1960 to 1965.
Greiman recalls time spent with Hofmann and his wife, Dorothea, at their home in Ticino in the summer of 1971, after studying in Basel. His manner was friendlier and more relaxed there. “He had abundant energy and liked to do very physical things like digging holes. He often made jokes. He had a charming playful side to him. Sometimes he would make Dorothea and I laugh very hard.” Near the end of Greiman’s stay, she received telegrams from Hiebert with information about her new teaching post at Philadelphia College of Art—she hadn’t applied. Hofmann confirmed the news. “There is no more I can teach you,” he told her. “You just have to get out there and start doing it.” So, at 23, feeling like she had been thrown out of the nest, she followed her instructor’s wishes and headed for Philadelphia.
Hofmann was born in Winterthur, Switzerland, in 1920. After studying at the School of Arts and Crafts in Zurich, he worked as a lithographer in Basel and Bern, and opened a studio in Basel. In 1947, he began teaching at the Basel School of Arts and Crafts after meeting Emil Ruder on a train and learning that the school was looking for a teacher. Hofmann would remain there for 40 years. In 1968, he initiated the advanced class for graphic design, and in 1973 he became head of the graphic design department. He first taught in the United States at Philadelphia College of Art in 1955, and shortly after began teaching at Yale University, where he played a key role until his resignation in 1991. In 1965, he published Graphic Design Manual, a distillation of the essential principles of his rational approach to teaching design. Nearly half a century later, the revised edition of this pedagogical classic is still in print.
Hofmann saw his designs, in part, as didactic demonstrations of these principles. The posters he created in the late 1950s and 1960s for cultural clients such as the Kunsthalle Basel and the Stadttheater Basel possess great typographic and photographic purity of form. In a theater poster, he interprets the dramatic experience of watching and listening with mesmerizingly large and grainy photos of an ear and eye, amplifying the impact by reducing the visual idea to its essential components. Another design assembles a formally perfect arrangement of fragments: column, music stand, section of cello, ballerina’s pointing foot, riding boot with spur. In Hofmann’s 1959 poster for the ballet Giselle, the stark white typographic tower of the title—note the intermediary dot of the “i”—holds the blurring halftone of the dancer’s pirouette in a state of dynamic balance and grace. A promotional poster for Herman Miller titled “Furniture of our Times” becomes a visual meditation on shapes for sitting on, visualized as a collection of near-abstract silhouettes.
“In its purity of form and purposeful expression, Hofmann’s work is uniquely personal,” says Allemann. “It also has soul.” For Robert and Alison Probst, who was also Hofmann’s student, these enduring designs are the work of “a master of his craft with a superior sense of aesthetics. His work deals with the universal language of signs and symbols, often including serendipity and always aiming for timeless beauty.”
It is easy today to underestimate the impression that these posters made in the streets. Hofmann’s sparing use of black and white had an argumentative and even ethical purpose. In the early days of the post-war consumer society, his work proposed (we might now think over-optimistically) a visual culture founded on an ideal of thoughtful restraint. “I have endeavored to do something to counteract the increasing trivialization of color evident since the Second World War on billboards, in modern utensils and in the entertainment industry,” he writes. “I tried to create a kind of counterpicture.” The coming of color TV only strengthened his resolve; all the “musicality” of color was lost. To generate expressive energy in a design, he would use color only in carefully determined patches within a neutral area. “I feel that a sensible and meaningful form of advertising can be achieved by simplification of the formal language and by restraint in the treatment of the verbal message,” he writes. “I was not prompted by advertising considerations in my work but rather by a feeling of regret that an important economic instrument should have begun to affect the cultural life of society so adversely.”
To appreciate fully what Hofmann achieved—what he stood for—we need to remember that his dedication to visual resolution represented a larger vision of civilized society. He belongs to a generation that sought to find a new visual language that would be appropriate for a complex technological world. “What few people have realised about Hofmann is that behind the artistic beauty of his design was a strong conviction about cultural, moral and social issues,” said Friedman in 1994. “He has high morals and a strong regard for environmental and social justice,” notes Probst, now dean of the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning at the University of Cincinnati. Allemann points out that Hofmann did not participate in the exploitation of Swiss Style by the corporate world. “He could foresee that what began as a utopian theory would turn into a style. This was something he was not interested in. Time has proven that he was right.”
While Hofmann’s posters are widely celebrated, there are aspects of his work that deserve, even now, to be better known. He was an artist as well as a designer, with a strong sense of structure and space; he created wall reliefs, glass paintings, floor tiles and mosaics, acoustic walls, and other sculptural pieces. In all of these art works, as with his students’ projects, he sought a kind of musical resonance, to which he gave the German word Klang. Hiebert describes this quality as the “convergence of visual logic and perceptual vitality.” “Es muess klinge—it has to be sonorous—was one of his famous sayings,” recalls Allemann.
What comes across, again and again, in the tales of those who studied with Hofmann is the generous spirit of a man who, by trying to express what he had to say as simply as possible, incised a deep and lasting impression. “I owe everything I know about design to Hofmann,” says Steff Geissbuhler. “He shaped me as a designer and a person.” Inge Druckrey remembers how Hofmann would take his students on field trips to see ceiling paintings in an early Romanesque church, modern architecture at Ronchamp, or the colored boats and beautiful light of an Italian fishing village on the way to Venice. “There was no lengthy commentary,” she says, “only the expression sauschoen, which meant ‘just look at it, this work is terrific.’” The same could just as readily be said of Hofmann’s designs. Only by looking hard will we be able to see.