TM Communication 20
Armin Hofmann, Basel: Gestalter, Lehrer und Pädagoge
André Gürtler, Wolfgang Weingart [Editors]
André Gürtler, Wolfgang Weingart [Editors]: TM Communication 20: Armin Hofmann, Basel: Gestalter, Lehrer und Pädagoge [Publishers offprint from Typografische Monatsblätter / Schweizer Graphische Mitteilungen / Revue suisse de l’imprimerie]. St. Gallen: Zollikofer / Schweizerischer Typographenbund Bern, Jahrgang 105, Nr. 3, March 1986. Text in German, English and French. Slim quarto. Perfect bound and stitched wrappers. [36] pp. Illustrated articles and trade advertisements. Cover Design: Heinz Hiltbrunner. Typefaces used throughout: Univers. A fine copy.
9 x 11.685 typography journal offprint with 36 pages devoted to 30 years of work by Armin Hofmann as assembled by TM Editors Wolfgang Weingart and André Gürtler.
“I created the supplements “TM Communication” and “Typographic Process.” You can see them from 1972 onward, I published student work but also work by other people; studios, typographers, photographers,” Wolfgang Weingart said in an interview. “[The goal of those supplements was] to show good arrangement of pages. Most of the time I made the pages as an educational example. That was the idea behind it. To publish different people, artists—and we were totally free to do what we wanted . . . It was a whole movement at the time. My idea was to change graphic design, Swiss graphic design, from this very strict way of making typography to a more lively way. And it had some effect, internationally too.”
Here is Rick Poynor’s AIGA Medalist essay: “If the passionate loyalty of former students is any indication, Armin Hofmann (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.
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.”
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.
The Typografische Monatsblätter was one of the most important journals to successfully disseminate the phenomenon of Swiss typography to an international audience, as well as spread the burgeoning ideas of the New Wave style. In existence for almost eighty years, the journal was a vital forum for concepts and discussion. Throughout these years, the Swiss typographic journal witnessed significant moments in the history of typography and graphic design. In the second half of the 20th century factors such as technology, socio-political contexts, and aesthetic ideologies profoundly affected and transformed visual language.
Wolfgang Weingart (Germany, 1941 – 2021) was an internationally known graphic designer and typographer. His work is categorized as Swiss typography and he is credited as "the father" of New Wave or Swiss Punk typography.
“For me, typography is a triangular relationship between design idea, typographic elements, and printing technique.”
Weingart was born near the Swiss border of Germany, in the Salem Valley, in 1941. He lived near Lake Constance for about thirteen years, moving to Lisbon in 1954 with his family. In April 1958 he returned to Germany and began his studies at the Merz Academy in Stuttgart, where he attended a two-year program in applied graphic arts. He learned typesetting, linocut and woodblock printing.
Weingart then completed a three-year typesetting apprenticeship in hot metal hand composition at Ruwe Printing. There he came into contact with the company’s consulting designer, Karl-August Hanke, who became his mentor and encouraged him to study in Switzerland.
Weingart met Emil Ruder and Armin Hofmann in Basel in 1963 and moved there the following year, enrolling as an independent student at the Schule für Gestaltung Basel (Basel School of Design). In 1968, he was invited to teach typography at the institution’s newly established Kunstgewerbeschule where Hofmann taught. The designers that surrounded Hofmann were not as focused on using Swiss-style principles in application to their work. These stylistic choices proved to be a great influence on Weingart, who was one of the first designers to abandon these strict principles that controlled Swiss design for decades. As he later wrote, “When I began teaching in 1968, classical, so-called “Swiss typography” (dating from the 1950s), was still commonly practiced by designers throughout Switzerland and at our school. Its conservative design dogma and strict limitations stifled my playful, inquisitive, experimental temperament and I reacted strongly against it. Yet at the same time I recognized too many good qualities in Swiss typography to renounce it altogether. Through my teaching I set out to use the positive qualities of Swiss typography as a base from which to pursue radically new typographic frontiers.”
Between 1974 and 1996, at Hofmann’s invitation, Weingart taught at the Yale Summer Program in Graphic Design in Brissago, Switzerland. For over forty years he has lectured and taught extensively in Europe, North and South America, Asia, Australia and New Zealand.
According to Weingart, "I took 'Swiss Typography' as my starting point, but then I blew it apart, never forcing any style upon my students. I never intended to create a 'style'. It just happened that the students picked up—and misinterpreted—a so-called 'Weingart style' and spread it around."
Weingart was a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI) from 1978 to 1999, and served on the editorial board of Typographische Monatsblätter magazine from 1970 to 1988. In 2005 he was awarded the honorary title of Doctor of Fine Arts from MassArt. In 2013 he was a recipient of the AIGA Medal, the highest honor of the design profession, for his typographic explorations and teaching. In 2014 Weingart received the Swiss Grand Prix of Design award, presented by the Federal Office of Culture for his lifelong merits as a designer. [Wikipedia]