For me, the B4 format [90.5 x 128cm] posters were a technical highpoint, and also a kind of summing up of my creative activity, confirming my feeling that each thing made is an important element of a whole, that different aspects of my work are interlinked. Over the years, I’ve been able to apply the collage technique I learned in the 1970s to film montage. I work out every visual and technical detail for the printer, from the design concept to the final artwork – the screen nuances and structures, line elements, surfaces. These recurrent visual elements have now become something of a trademark. The lithographic half-tone dot, which I saw as a new, self-contained graphic element, has possibly become part of my personal image. Neue Haas Grotesk was developed by the Haas foundry in Münchenstein, Switzerland, to counteract the preference of the leading modernist Swiss designers of the postwar period for Akzidenz Grotesk—a typeface sold by H. Berthold AG, a German type foundry. This was both a matter of sales and national pride… but the attempt failed. The great majority of Swiss designers continued to use Akzidenz Grotesk (commonly known as AG). Swiss Design was important because designers established principles based on objectivity and clarity. While there are many characteristics of Swiss Design, designers still found a way to make dynamic and exciting posters. In the present day, we see many of the characteristics of Swiss Design still applied. Let's take a look at some of the elements that made Swiss Design famous: The Grid System Post World War II there came a time when most of the domains of applied arts failed to come up with a new form of expression. That is when Ruder revolutionized the traditional typography by divorcing it from all the previous conventional rules that it followed. He introduced new laws of composition that seemed to be in accordance with the modern times. Despite Ruder’s inclination toward pictorial thinking, he never found himself indulging in merely playful designs. According to him such indulgences result in losing the actual purpose of printing that is legibility. Furthermore, he stressed that the aesthetic affects are not to be discounted even when the primary goal of typography is communication. Among other methods employed by Ruder in his artwork, one of them was contrast. He pursued the craft of letterpress printing with utter dedication and devotion. The Bauhaus style also known as the International Style became one of the most influential currents in Modernist architecture and modern design. It was marked by the absence of ornamentation and by harmony between the function of an object or a building and its design. The Bauhaus had a major impact on design trends in Western Europe, the United States, Canada and Israel in the decades following its demise and that’s why it is the part of this ‘International Typographic Style’.

At 28 years of age, Ruder moved to Basel, where he developed his production as a designer and his teaching work. He taught at the Allgemeine Gewerbeschule, now called Schule für Gestaltung Basel (Basel School of Design). The Laserwriter fonts were licensed by the respective mfgrs to Adobe, which produced them in PostScript format and then licensed them to Apple along with PostScript etc. To my recollection, Adobe, not Apple developed the “Symbol” font, based somewhat on Times. Courier was never trademarked by IBM, so Adobe created a “stroke-based” version of it (to reduce file size) and used the name without license from IBM. Acontributing writer and editor forthe then-popular trade publicationTypografische Monatsblätter (Typographic Monthly)he was one of thepioneers to discard all of the conventional rules of traditional typographyestablishingnew laws of composition more in accord with thepost warera. Ruder excelled as a typographer, developing a holistic approach to design and teaching that consisted of philosophy, theory, and a systematic methodology. Ruder attached great importance to sans-serif or no-end typefaces. Speculative historical thinking, or counterfactual history, whether by historians or novelists, tries to imagine what might have happened if the outcome of a key moment in the past had been different. It has usually been applied to momentous events such as the expulsion of the Moors from Spain, the American Civil War, the two World Wars or the assassination of John F. Kennedy. But suppose we apply such thinking to something more mundane: the popularity of a typeface. Like Helvetica and Univers…for example.

That's It!

For Emil Ruder, the goal of typography was to communicate ideas through writing, promoting the good and the beautiful in word and image, to open the way to the arts. The 1950s was by no means the first time grid structures appeared in design, but it marked the birth of a particular set of rules put in place by its practitioners, and the era remains a cultural touch point across the world. The Swiss grid avoided referencing historic stylistic trends traditionally associated with any single country, thus appearing universal, anonymous, and modern. As such, it spread to all aspects of visual messaging, from book layouts to subway signs, posters to instruction manuals. Additionally, in a fractured postwar era, the trilingual publications produced in Switzerland spread around the world, coming to define Modern design and reinforcing grid-based layouts.

YSS: Then you went to Basle. The light, delicate typography of some of your first works there seems to indicate that you discovered the idea of the line as image very early on.

What If We Altered The Grid?

The style of decoration of the Arts and Crafts Movement was similar to medieval times. The style was influential in many different types of design, like architecture, typography, textile design, and books. Together with Armin Hofmann, he established the design style known as Swiss Design, which favored asymmetrical compositions and the use of negative space in compositions. Ruder was one of the main contributors and developers of Swiss Design. In 1954 the French type foundry Deberny & Peignot wanted to add a linear sans serif type in several weights to the range of the Lumitype fonts. Adrian Frutiger, the foundry’s art director, suggested refraining from adapting an existing alphabet. He wanted to instead make a new font that would, above all, be suitable for the typesetting of longer texts — quite an exciting challenge for a sans-serif font at that time. Starting with his old sketches from his student days at the School for the Applied Arts in Zurich, he created the Univers type family. In 1957, the family was released by Deberny & Peignot, and afterwards, it was produced by Linotype.

Their teaching achieved an international reputation by the mid-1950sand by the mid-1960s their courses were maintaining lengthy waiting lists. Yvonne Schwemer-Scheddin: Retrospectives like your recent exhibition in Darmstadt always have something of a narcissistic element to them.What if Steve Jobs had gone to the Allgemeine Gewerbeschule (school) in Basel—as a number of Americans did in the 1970s—instead of Reed College? What and who would have influenced his choice of typefaces for the Macintosh? If Jobs had been in Basel he would have come under the influence either of Ruder’s followers (Ruder had died in 1970) and/or Wolfgang Weingart, Ruder’s successor as typography instructor. But along with the strong views on type held by those at the Basel school itself, he may have come under the broader sway of several designers working in a “Modernist classical” style: the elderly Jan Tschichold, the book designer Jost Hochuli, the book designer and type critic Max Cafl isch, and the type designer Hans Eduard Meier. Furthermore, in Switzerland neither Helvetica nor ITC typefaces would have loomed as large as they did during that decade in the United States. Emil Ruder played a key role in the development of graphic design in the 1940s and 1950s. His style has inspired many designers, and his use of grids in design has even influenced the development of web design. 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. [5] :178 These three things—Helvetica, ITC and Steve Jobs—all collided in 1984, the year that the first Macintosh computer, replete with typefaces, was released. The Macintosh core font set was a combination of the then-most popular typefaces and typefaces that filled out a stylistic and functional range, with the latter being chosen by the dominant type manufacturers at that time. Thus, there were four typefaces (Helvetica, New Century Schoolbook, Palatino and Times) from Linotype and four typefaces from the International Typeface Corporation (ITC Avant Garde Gothic, ITC Bookman, ITC Zapf Chancery and ITC Zapf Dingbats). In addition, there was Courier from IBM and Symbol from Apple itself.* YSS: Often the time you spend in school has a decisive influence on your later life. Was this the case for you?

The book has changed my views about typography in various ways and i totally agree with the author's statements like "Typography has one plain duty before it and that is to convey information in writing. No argument or consideration can absolve typography from this duty.".YSS: Expressive typography is the foundation of your work. Was New Wave the translation into type of a subjective, youthful sensibility? Emil Ruder was already teaching typography for fifteen years at the Gewerbeschule Basel, when the first article in the cycle Wesentliches appeared in TM” writes Helmut Schmidwho designed “Emil Ruder: fundamentals.” Some of the bitterness in this statement surely comes from the fact that the development of Neue Helvetica in 1983 ironically followed the blueprint Frutiger had established for Univers in 1957, right down to the numbering of each member of the family. BUT… The common denominator of these styles is the use of simple geometric shapes and sans serif typography with very unusual placements. Grids became an essential tool for organization. "Alexander Rodchenko Dobrolyot Poster Soviet USSR CCCP Early Aeronautics & Aviation" by russian_constructivism is licensed under CC BY 2.0.