Weingart

Each week to keep our brains ever active, creative and inspired we have a Mid Week Meathead....What is this strange meaty thing you ask? Well simply, each week a member of our team gives a small talk on a topic of their choosing. Our designer Dario had this wonderful bit for us to keep our imaginations hearty, also it makes for great dinner party conversation. Enjoy! 

“Phototypesetting with its technical possibilities is leading today’s typography into a game with out game rules.” 

Wolfgang Weingart wrote this statement in 1964, in an article for the trade journal Druckspiegel. Weingart was convinced that technological development was “finally” giving graphic designers freedom from the “reductive convention” of Swiss Design, and it was opening the doors to the possibility of demonstrating that typography and graphic design are art. 

Wolfgang Weingart studied in Basel, Switzerland where he learned the severe rules of Swiss Design. His ideas came directly from the “Modernist” context. He felt that within the Swiss Design rules, everything that he was interested in was forbidden. Weingart was one of the first to belive that an artistic field such Graphic Design was being constrained by so many reductive rules. He was fascinated by the idea to innovate Graphic Design through new experimentations. Through investigating the field of typography he understood how to brake the rules of the grid system. This new wave was a starting point for the creation of a new style, that in the 80s toom the name of Postmodernism. This new wave grew fast because of the need to brake away to the rules and the style of modernism. 

Where the technical possibilities are leading graphic design today? After more than 50 years is graphic design still constrained by “Swiss Design” rules?