The first publication in a new series made in collaboration with the poster collection of the Museum für Gestaltung in Zurich (Design Museum) and the Swiss publisher Lars Müller. This first volume contains a cross-section of a year chosen at random, the poster collection casts its net in its own archive and presents posters from Paris, London, Moscow, Vienna, Zurich or Milan. They all have only one thing in common: the year (1926) in which they were produced.

Donald Brun (1909-1999) helped to shape the world of Swiss posters from the 1930s and created outstanding advertising material in the illustrative abstract style. He was a co-founder of the Alliance Typographique Internationale AGI in 1951.
This is the second volumn in the new series of publications documenting the poster collection of the Museum für Gestaltung in Zürich.

This volume covers the posters commissioned by the Museum in the period 1980 to 2000.
Many are innovating designs coming from young and often still relatively unknown designers.

Hors-Sol is a record of poster actions conducted by artists in public places in Switzerland, starting with the sensational campaign mounted by the Zurich Concrete Artists in 1961.

Architecture can try to have itself read as a text, and typography also knows that it can be a physical experience, thus taking centre stage and acquiring a sculptural presence. The necessary brevity of poster texts has always encouraged a certain openness to typographical experiment. Enriching type by the addition of an architectural dimension has produced a fascinating wealth of visual effect in these posters.

With a disease involving sexuality, a continuing issue is what can actually be shown. Impact and inexplicitness compete and jostle each other. Typically, attempts to create a series of explicit visual signs always flounder when it comes to sex.

Armin Hofmann (b.1920) is a highly regarded Swiss graphic designer and educator whose poster designs belong to some of the best of the second half of the 20th. century. His posters are visual appeals that point beyond the primary information. Rapid technological and social change constantly pushed him to make demands, as astute as they were discrete, for a design approach able to provide a visual culture appropriate to a modern, complex society. Despite being tied to a particular locality, the posters became prototypes for an attitude that made an extraordinary impact.

"Because the presence of colour is taken for granted, it is losing its impact as a visual communication code. Paul Rand wrote as early as 1949 : "Many advertisers and advertising artists feel that an advertisement becomes more colorful in proportion to the amount of color used in it. This is often untrue". A little later the colourist Armin Hofmann justified his black-and-white posters on the grounds that the subtle colours he would have liked to explore would have made no effect amidst the clamor of public space.
Whatever motivation or approach the posters may be based on in this context - they demonstrate plausibly that by opting for 'black and white' as a system, design can win back its power, and colour its urgency." (Felix Studinka)

Ralph Schraivogel has been working as a poster designer for twenty years now and his highly individual approach has made him into a figure of great respect in Switzerland and he regularly wins top awards in national and international competitions.
"With every new project Schraivogel gives the impression of calling his past experience into question. Therefore, from one poster to the next , there exists great - and sometimes rather unsettling- diversity, as if different artists were involved. Sometimes the typography takes pride of place, other times the illustration. Other times still, the two are mixed, the lettering and the drawing inextricably linked." (Robert Massin)

This is the 10th. volume in the Museum für Gestaltung's excellent series of small publications in which they are exposing their enormous collection of posters.
Michael Engelmann (1928-1966) was a German poster designer without reservation; his posters and advertisements bring images and concepts together in a monumental, simple and compelling way to make them into signals with strong associative force. Unadorned photography, definite colours, laconic texts set in functional type; these are the formal elements Engelmann uses to produce a sign language that is dense, and yet seems light at the same time. In the 1950s, taking his lead from American advertising practice, he adopted a strictly conceptual working method attempting to drive any trace of unsophisticated adulation out of German advertising.

The Poster Collection of the Museum für Gestaltung in Zürich is one of the most comprehensive and significant archives of its kind in the world and it offers a record of the history of the poster, in Switzerland and worldwide, from its beginnings in the 19th century to the present day. The collection is continually being expanded and brought up to date, in dialogue with contemporary output and acknowledging historical achievements.
This is the 11th. volume in the Museum's excellent series of small publications in which they are exposing their enormous collection of posters. This volume's criterion for selection is the idea of something being "handmade" and most of the designers represented are at home in both the analogue and the digital world.

This is the 12th. volume in the Museum für Gestaltung's excellent series of small publications in which they are exposing their enormous collection of posters.
"What Catherine Zask conveys is the primitive force of both the word and the letter. And the message is all the more resounding in that the alphabet she uses remains phonetic at the same time as it explodes visually and the eye listens." (Henri Gaudin)

"The graphic posters presented under the title Typo China remain mysterious and encoded in many respects in Western eyes. And yet it is precisely the Chinese characters, their pictorial quality and expressiveness, that make both reading and merely looking at the posters a fascinating experience - feeling our way into a cultural atmosphere that is still too unfamiliar, and that can enrich our experience well beyond the graphic and visual field." (Eva Lüdi Kong)

"Entrepreneurial initiative, social openness and cultural diversity meant that Milan before and above all after the Second World War was absolutely predestined to develop the effervescent cultural climate that was shaped and created in a quite crucial way by graphic designers from Switzerland." (Han Höger)

"Most of the posters exhibited here were advertisements for events in the context of alternative culture. A combative élan is palpable in their visual idiom, as is a rejection of the codes of consumer culture, which makes it clear that it was about more than culture. The posters and their visual language signal the existence of other ideas of culture in the public arena, of a Switzerland beyond the mainstream." Martin Jaeggi

Connections between the graphic language of comics and that of the poster can be identified in terms of both form and content. Even though the sequential pictorial narrative of the comic strip is condensed into an individual image appropriate to the poster's frame, the narrative approach remains comparable: humour, and a vivid overdrawing in a constant mixture of reality and fiction are typical features. The appropriation of specific design elements characteristic of comics for use as pictorial codes is starting to be taken for granted in contemporary posters.

"The focus is on eight graphic artists chosen to exemplify today consciously, using photography and type as their means of expression. In the posters of Michal Batory, Cyan, Werner Jeker, M/M (Paris), Gerwin Schmidt, Skolos/Wedell, Leonardo Sonnoli, and Tschumi Küng, it becomes clear that different visual conceptions can have different consequences for the use of photography, and can conceal different attitudes towards graphic design." (Bettina Richter)