The International Typographic Style

After World War II, designers in Switzerland and Germany codified Modernist graphic design into a cohesive movement called Swiss Design, or the International Typographic Style. These designers sought a neutral and objective approach that emphasized rational planning and de-emphasized the subjective, or individual, expression. They constructed modular grids of horizontal and vertical lines and used them as a structure to regularize and align the elements in their designs. These designers preferred photography (another technical advance that drove the development of graphic design) as a source for imagery because of its machine-made precision and its ability to make an unbiased record of the subject. They created asymmetrical layouts, and they embraced the prewar designers’ preference for sans-serif typefaces. The elemental forms of the style possessed harmony and clarity, and adherents considered these forms to be an appropriate expression of the postwar scientific and technological age.

Josef Müller-Brockmann was a leading designer, educator, and writer who helped define this style. His poster, publication, and advertising designs are paradigms of the movement. In a long series of Zürich concert posters, Müller-Brockmann used colour, an arrangement of elemental geometric forms, and type to express the structural and rhythmic qualities of music. A 1955 poster for a concert featuring music by Igor Stravinsky, Wolfgang Fortner, and Alban Berg demonstrates these properties, along with Müller-Brockmann’s belief that using one typeface in two sizes (display and text) makes the message clear and accessible to the audience.

The programmatic uniformity of this movement would be widely adopted by designers working in the area of visual identity systems during the second half of the 20th century. Multinational corporations soon adopted the tenets of the International Typographic Style: namely, the standardized use of trademarks, colours, and typefaces; the use of consistent grid formats for signs and publications; the preference for the contemporary ambience of sans-serif types; and the banishment of ornament.

Postwar graphic design in the United States

While designers in Europe were forging the International Typographic Style into a cohesive movement, American designers were synthesizing concepts from modern art into highly individualistic and expressive visual statements. From the 1940s through the 1960s, New York City was a major centre for innovation in design as well as the fine arts.

During the 1940s, Paul Rand emerged as an American designer with a personal and innovative approach to modern design. Rand understood the vitality and symbolic power of colour and shape in the work of artists such as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Pablo Picasso. In a 1947 poster promoting New York subway advertising, for example, Rand created a design from elemental geometric forms and colours that can be read as both an abstracted figure as well as a target, conveying the concept that one can “hit the bull’s-eye,” or reach potential audiences for plays, stores, and other goods and services by advertising in the subway. An ordinary message is rendered extraordinary through the power of visual forms and symbols. Rand’s work spanned a range of graphic media including advertising, book jackets, children’s books, corporate literature (such as annual reports), packaging, posters, trademarks, and typefaces.

In the 1950s Rand began to spend more of his time on corporate image projects, and he designed what would become ubiquitous trademarks and visual identities for major corporations including IBM, Westinghouse, the ABC television network, and UPS. Many other prominent designers—including Saul Bass (whose many visual identity programs included logos for AT&T), Lester Beall, and the partnership of Tom Geismar and Ivan Chermayeff—focused their practices upon corporate design, as multinational corporations understood the need for consistent graphic standards in their facilities and communications throughout the world.

Bradbury Thompson, a prominent magazine art director, designed a publication called Westvaco Inspirations for a major paper manufacturer from 1938 until the early 1960s. His playful and innovative approach to type and imagery is shown in the design of a spread from Westvaco Inspirations 210 (1958). Here, Thompson responded to the geometric forms of African masks in the Ben Somoroff photograph in the spread by “drawing” a masklike face out of letters spelling “Westvaco.” Thompson’s complex layouts combined art with coloured shapes and unusual typographic arrangements. He explored printing techniques by separating the four plates used to print full-colour images—cyan (a warm blue), magenta, yellow, and black—and having them printed in different positions on the page. He also had engravings from old books enlarged and overprinted in unexpected colours. These experiments were very influential, as they showed a generation of designers new possibilities.

Magazines placed more emphasis upon graphic design during the postwar period. Alexey Brodovitch, the art director of Harper’s Bazaar from 1934 until 1958, pioneered a new approach to magazine design. He created a flowing perceptual experience for the reader who paged through his magazines by varying sizes of type and imagery, alternating complex pages with simple layouts containing large areas of white space, and creating an overall sense of rhythmic movement. The beauty of Brodovitch’s designs was enhanced by the impressive team of collaborators at Bazaar, which included photographer Richard Avedon.

The postwar period has been called a “golden age” of magazine design, when art directors including Henry Wolf (at Esquire and Harper’s Bazaar) and Otto Storch (at McCall’s) extended Brodovitch’s imaginative approach to page layout in large-format magazines. Storch believed concept, text, type, and image should be inseparable in editorial design, and he applied this belief to the editorial pages of McCall’s.

The emergence of television began to alter the roles of print media and graphic design, while also creating new opportunities for designers to work on television commercials and on-air graphics. “Motion graphics” are kinetic graphic designs for film titles and television that occur in the fourth dimension—time. A variety of animated film techniques were applied to motion-picture titling in the 1950s by Saul Bass and, in Canada, by Norman McLaren of the Canadian National Film Board. For example, Bass’s titles for Otto Preminger’s 1959 film Anatomy of a Murder reduce a prone figure to disjointed parts, which move onto the screen in carefully orchestrated sequences that conclude with their positioning to form the figure; the lettering of the film’s title appears as part of the sequence.

Vernacular imagery and popular culture inspired a generation of American designer/illustrators who began their careers after World War II, including the 1954 founders of the Push Pin Studio in New York. Their work combined a fascination with the graphic simplicity and directness of comic books with a sophisticated understanding of modern art, especially of Surrealism and Cubism. The Push Pin artists’ unabashedly eclectic interest in art and design history led them to incorporate influences ranging from Persian rugs to children’s art and decorative Victorian typefaces. In their work, a graphic vibrancy supported a strong conceptual approach to the visual message.

Several major directions emerged in American graphic design in the 1960s. Political and social upheavals of the decade were accompanied by a resurgence of poster art addressing the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, environmentalism, and the Vietnam War. Placing ads on radio and television was beyond the economic means of most private citizens, independent art groups, and social-activist organizations; however, they could afford to print and distribute flyers and posters, and they could even sell their posters to public sympathizers to raise money for their causes.

As popular music became increasingly culturally significant, graphics for the recording industry emerged as a locus of design creativity. One Push Pin Studio founder, Milton Glaser, captured the imagination of a generation with his stylized curvilinear drawing, bold flat colour, and original concepts. Glaser’s poster (1967) for folk-rock musician Bob Dylan is one of many music graphics from the 1960s that achieved an iconic presence not unlike that of Flagg’s I Want You poster from World War I. Over the course of the second half of the century, Glaser steadily expanded his interests to include magazine design, restaurant and retail store interiors, and visual identity systems.

The 1960s also saw the rapid decline of hand- and machine-set metal type as they were replaced by display-and-keyboard phototype systems. Since it is very inexpensive to produce new typefaces for photographic typesetting, the widespread use of phototype systems set off a spate of new designs and reissues of long-unavailable typefaces, such as decorative Victorian wood types. American Herb Lubalin is notable among the designers who embraced the new flexibility phototype made possible for designers. Type could be set in any size, the spaces between letters and lines could be compressed, and letters could be expanded, condensed, touched, overlapped, or slanted. Lubalin’s ability to make powerful visual communications solely with type is seen in a 1968 announcement for an antiwar poster contest sponsored by Avant Garde magazine. The magazine’s logo, placed in the dot of the exclamation point, uses ligatures (two or more letters combined into one form) and alternate characters to form a tightly compressed image. This logo was developed into a typeface named Avant Garde, one of the most successful and widely used fonts of the phototype period.

A creative revolution in advertising writing and design also occurred during this period. Advertising agencies approached marketing objectives through the use of witty headlines, simple layouts, and clever visual images. Copywriters and art directors, working as collaborative creative teams, sought a synergy between word and image. The Doyle Dane Bernbach advertising agency played an influential role in the history of graphic design by creating advertisements that spoke intelligently to consumers and avoided the hyperbole of the typical “hard sell.”

One of the many advertising designers who launched his career at Doyle Dane Bernbach was George Lois, whose works were engagingly simple and direct. Lois went on to design over 90 covers for Esquire magazine in the 1960s. He used powerful photographs and photomontages, usually by Carl Fischer, to make succinct editorial statements about the United States. These designs acted as independent visual/verbal statements about such topics as assassinations and civil rights.