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Swiss Grid

The Swiss Grid was an exhibition at Poster House in New York City that launched February 26, 2020. Ten days after opening, the museum shut down due to Covid-19. With input from designers and educators, Poster House transitioned the exhibition into a remote learning tool that provides historical and pedagogical context for some of the technical teachings of design.

Using the core material from the original exhibition, this site considers how a particular aesthetic—referred to throughout as “The Swiss Grid”—developed out of post-WWII Switzerland and spread around the world through generations of practitioners, and how the grid was used to create incredible posters for the cultural sector. This microsite interweaves contemporary attitudes towards teaching mid-century Modernism and the desire to both break free of and find new use for grid systems in contemporary design.

The Grid System

The Swiss Grid

Since its emergence in the 1950s, no other graphic design legacy has had a greater impact than the Swiss grid. Whether adhering to it, playing with it, or decrying it, it is the staple of mid-century Modernism whose influence has never waned.

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.

Key designers published their own textbooks and took up teaching positions in Europe, the United States, India, Latin America, Japan, and beyond, ensuring that the next generation of graphic designers was familiar with the flexible grid.

Multinational corporations also saw grid-based design as an efficient problem-solving device for the new global market, and it was quickly accepted as a “neutral,” universally appealing aesthetic that was ideal for conveying information clearly.

The posters at the heart of this exhibition show how the grid was adapted with precision and whimsy for many cultural clients, and how it was applied in surprising ways to create balanced and detailed compositions with minimal motifs, many of which remain icons of the era.

Audrey Bennett

MDes Program Director and Professor, Stamps School of Art & Design

While white Western practitioners are most often credited with the development of the grid structure, Bennett traces its origin to ancient African architecture and repositions African design as the source of this universally appealing aesthetic.

Follow the Golden Ratio from Africa to the Bauhaus for a Cross-Cultural Aesthetic for Images

Before The Grid

Before the development of the grid, Switzerland had already embraced a cohesive aesthetic that set it apart from the rest of Europe. Around 1914, poster sizes within the country were standardized (known as the Weltformat or World Format poster) and rules were introduced establishing where posters could be officially displayed in public. Designers excelled at the classic illustrational poster, promoting tourism through sun-dappled landscapes and products through handsome renderings of goods.

A poster with men standing in formation wearing white outfits and with their left arms in the air.

Turnfest in Basel, 1912

Eduard Renggli (1863–1921)
Poster House Permanent Collection

  • First held in 1832, the Federal Turnfest in Switzerland is the country’s largest sporting event, focusing primarily on gymnastics and other athletic feats.
  • Renggli’s poster shows the wispy, atmospheric treatment of line that dominated Swiss design in the 1910s.

A poster with a black and tan patterned jacket with an inside tag that reads Marque PKZ in green.

PKZ, 1923

Otto Baumberger (1889–1961)
Poster House Permanent Collection

  • Text was typically expressive and artistically integrated into the compositions. Baumberger is one of Switzerland’s most important and prolific graphic designers, creating over 200 posters during his career.
  • This poster is a marvelous example of the Sachplakat (Object Poster) style in which a product is presented in a simple close-up with little additional visual material. The assumption is that the product can sell itself.
  • Baumberger ingeniously uses the tag on the coat to indicate the brand, leaving no need for additional promotional text.

A poster with an illustration of a man in a navy suit and hat smoking a cigarette over red letters PKZ.

PKZ, 1924

A. Ernst Kretschmann (1897–1941)
Poster House Permanent Collection

  • Most posters would also have to be redesigned in one or more of the country’s four languages (German, French, Italian, and Romansh) to meet governmental rules on advertising—an artistic challenge as many translated words or phrases took up different quantities of space on a page. By the late 1950s, however, this illustrational style had run its course. Idyllic imagery seemed dishonest in the postwar years, and companies within a newly unified Europe sought to access a growing international market as efficiently and cohesively as possible.
  • Primarily a military painter, this is Kretschmann’s only known poster.
  • Founded in 1881, PKZ was Switzerland’s first men’s department store and produced some of the best posters within the country. This design is no exception, combining a touch of Art Deco with classic illustrational techniques.

Swiss Style

What is Swiss Style?

Swiss Style is known by many different names, often used interchangeably. Some other terms you may see which refer to the same style are:
International Typographic Style
Anonymous Style
Swiss International Style

Why Switzerland?

1939: As a neutral territory, Switzerland was one of the few European countries to emerge relatively unscathed from World War II. Unlike its neighboring countries, its infrastructure had not been destroyed, its citizens had not been witness to mass bloodshed, and its economy had been steadily recovering since the crash in 1929.

Foreign artists and innovators saw the country as a haven, taking up teaching positions in Zürich and Basel where their forward-thinking ideas were nurtured. While the rest of the world recovered, Switzerland had the luxury of focusing on cultural growth.

1941: The government and professional organizations started sponsoring design competitions like The Best Swiss Poster, touring the winning designs both at home and abroad. Museums hosted exhibitions about new Swiss design, inviting the artists to lecture and create catalogs and posters for the shows.

1944: Design publications like Graphis (1944) also flourished, introducing Swiss graphics to the world through trilingual volumes in English, German, and French.

Most of the winners of these competitions, as well as the people creating the exhibition posters and new publications, were professors at the two biggest design schools in Switzerland—the Allgemeine Gewerbeschule (later the Schule für Gestaltung) in Basel and the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zürich—where grid-based design was being developed and taught. These numerous outlets allowed this particularly Swiss style to spread and saturate the international design community with unprecedented speed.

1948: By the late 1940s, homegrown companies around the world with an eye for the increasingly international market wanted recognizable brand identities that set them apart from the competition. This crisp, easy-to-understand means of communication was at once particularly “Swiss” and adaptable to any country. And so these brands turned to the professors in Zürich and Basel to define a new advertising age.

Typography

You will notice that three major font families are used in Swiss posters from this time. Each has its own unique history.

Akzidenz Grotesk Bold

Developed as Royal Grotesk c. 1890 by Ferdinand Theinhardt, the Berthold type foundry in Berlin would rename it Akzidenz Grotesk when it purchased Theinhardt’s foundry from the Mommen brothers in 1908. This would become the preferred font of the Zürich School. It is also referred to as Accidenz-Grotesque or, after it had been introduced in the United States and Great Britain in the 1960s, as Standard, and would include slight variations depending on which point size was used. A “grotesk” refers to any sans-serif typeface of the 19th century and beyond, while “akzidenz” translates loosely to “everyday jobbing” (as opposed to book printing).

Univers 65 Bold

Developed in France by former Zürich design student Adrian Frutiger, this typeface would be released by the Deberny & Peignot foundry in 1957. It was specifically designed for photocomposition (where letterforms on glass are projected at any desired size onto film to be printed via offset lithography) and metal type. It was the preferred font family of Emil Ruder and his followers, considered by many designers to be more elegant and less rigid than pre-existing grotesks. It was also offered in a more consistently designed and visually harmonious family of weights and widths than either Helvetica or Akzidenz Grotesk. Univers has the added benefit of being one of the few sans-serif typefaces legible enough to be used for book publication.

Helvetica Bold

Originally known as Neue Haas Grotesk, this typeface was developed by Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann of the Haas Typefoundry in Munchenstein, Switzerland in 1957. It was renamed Helvetica (meaning “the Swiss one”) a few years later by D. Stempel, the German foundry who had part interest in Haas and also owned German Linotype. The renaming of the font by Stempel and its adaptation to the linotype machine enabled the widespread European popularity of Helvetica. Based on Akzidenz Grotesk, it gave stronger consideration to machine typesetting and had an overall goal of being visually neutral. Helvetica would eventually become the main export of the Swiss Style, redefining corporate and governmental communication around the world. You will notice, however, that no posters in this show feature Helvetica.

Designers

Many of the influential Swiss designers can be divided into two basic schools–Basel and Zürich.

The Zürich and Basel camps of Swiss design can both be traced back to a single man: Ernst Keller. Teaching at the Kunstgewerbeschule from 1918–56, he is often referred to as the Father of Swiss Style, having directly trained most of the key players who would go on to define this movement. While he did not explicitly promote the use of a grid system, his teaching methods put communication first, focusing on typography over illustration.

At the same time, postwar Zürich was a hotbed of artistic activity: Bauhaus students like Max Bill promoted Concrete art that, like De Stijl and Constructivism, emphasized abstract geometry, while Jan Tschichold’s highly praised 1928 publication The New Typography glorified asymmetry and photomontage in graphic communication. These landmark influences put some of Keller’s students in the perfect position to develop a specific design tool that stressed clarity and communication over all else: the flexible grid.

Basel

Looser adherence to the grid

High contrast photography

Artistically placed lettering

Experimentation with Univers

Zürich

Strict adherence to the grid

Less photography

More reliance on prominent text

Preference for Akzidenz-Grotesk

Basel

Emil Ruder
Hermann Eidenbenz
Armin Hofman
Karl Gerstner
Fridolin Müller
Robert Büchler
Ruth Pfalzberger
Markus Kutter

Zürich

Josef Müller-Brockmann
Richard Paul Lohse
Ernst Hiestand
Hans Neuburg
Carlo Vivarelli
Nelly Rudin
Gottfried Honegger
Aldo Calabresi
Rosmarie Tissi

A neon green square with black text along the top that reads Grids Are Games: notes on a relationship.

Ramon Tejada

Assistant Professor, Rhode Island School of Design

Ramon Tejada plays a classic game of Kill Your Idols. Growing up with the canon of Swiss design, he tells the story of how he learned to use grids to showcase personality and culture as opposed to acting as rigid monoliths, and highlights diverse uses of grid design from around the world.

GRIDS are games: notes on a 
relationship

A poster of a black and white hand pointing directly at the viewer on an orange background.

Auch Du Bist Liberal, 1959

Karl Gerstner (1930–2017)

  • This election poster stating “you, too, are liberal,” plays on the 1914 British enlistment poster featuring Lord Kitchener, a pose made iconic by James Montgomery Flagg’s “I Want You” design in 1917.
  • The out-of-focus image allows the viewer to imagine a person of any gender in the role, while the use of “du” (a familiar form of “you” reserved primarily for family members) adds an extra element of intimacy to the composition.

A poster with a washed out female face within a framed mirror.

Stadt Theater Basel, 1964
Armin Hofmann (1920–2020)

  • Hofmann produced numerous posters throughout the 1950s and ‘60s for the Basel City Theater.
  • The rectangular box at the lower left is demarcated so that a weekly schedule of events can be placed inside it. This allows the poster to remain in use for an entire year, avoiding the cost of designing and printing a new image every few weeks.

A poster of a black and white photograph of a person covering their ears with their hands and orange diagonal text.

Weniger Lärm, 1960
Josef Müller-Brockmann (1914–96)

  • Paid for by the Swiss Committee for Noise Abatement, this photo-offset poster was hung in groupings throughout Zürich, encouraging citizens to be aware of the unpleasantness of noise pollution.
  • Between 1947 and 1952, the number of cars doubled in Switzerland, leading to numerous PSAs related to safety and general social courtesy. By the late ‘50s, aviation and construction noises had also become a major nuisance for city dwellers.
  • In this design, the grid has been shifted to 50 degrees, providing a visual tension that not only echoes, but also enhances the message of the poster.

A poster with a black and white photograph of a woman's head wearing a headset in front of grey and orange horizontal text.

London Telephone, 1957
Josef Müller-Brockmann (1914–96)

  • Printed via photo-offset lithography in three different languages, this poster promotes the London Telephone company as the quickest and cheapest method of communication around the world.
  • Some speculate that actual telegram type was enlarged and printed alongside the photo of the telephone operator.

A poster with a black and white front view of a vintage car with bold red text above it.

Citroën, 1958
Karl Gerstner (1930–2017)
Markus Kutter (1925–2005)

  • One of many works Gerstner and Kutter would create for the Citroën automotive company, this poster announces an exhibition and competition in which a car is first prize.
  • Printed via photo-offset lithography, the red text appears in three different sizes, creating a visual force comparable to the weight of the head-on automobile that grounds the composition.
  • Gerstner was especially fond of running certain elements off the page to create impact. Here, the tail of the “1” bleeds to the edge of the paper, while the car is sliced so that its edge runs along the same grid as the body of the number.
  • Perhaps inspired by the writings of Max Bill, none of the proper nouns in this poster are capitalized.

A poster with an aerial view of a black and white typewriter below red and black text.

Olivetti, 1961
Ernst Hiestand (b. 1935)

  • Two versions of this poster exist: This one, announcing that 60 Olivetti typewriters will be given away as raffle prizes at an exhibition in Zürich, and a more common version that just promotes the brand itself.
  • Rather than display the typewriter from the side, Hiestand chose to present it from above, creating a flat plane that emphasizes the geometric layout of the page.
  • Fun Fact: The Lettera 22 typewriter was designed by Marcello Nizzoli, the artist who created the Art Deco Campari poster in our timeline upstairs!

A poster with differently sized black circles above small black text.

Musica Viva, 1958
Josef Müller-Brockmann (1914–96)

  • Presented in the order in which they were made, these three letterpress posters are part of a series Müller-Brockmann designed for the Zürich Tonhalle. Seen together, they demonstrate the flexibility of the grid system, from a combination of three columns and precisely-measured geometric images to a monolithic block of solid text, to two separate columns of differing weights.
  • Staying true to a flexible grid system, the circles in the first poster are all mathematically related.

A poster with black text and a few words in red.

Musica Viva, 1960
Josef Müller-Brockmann (1914–96)

  • The latter two posters (printed two months apart) highlight the title of the series along with the most important performers, emphasizing them through the use of red rather than the music they would be playing. By not using capital letters, the spaces between lines of text and the letterforms themselves (leading and kerning) are more comfortably condensed, creating a weightier block of information. This is underscored by the parentheses which are in a slightly smaller point size than the rest of the text. Most printers would not have had enough wood or plastic type in a single size of Akzidenz Grotesk to create such a word-heavy poster.
  • Do you notice a mistake in the printing of the middle poster? In the first line of text, a spacing element in the letterpress process has been accidentally inked, leading to some transfer. This imperfection speaks to the manual nature of this printing process.

A poster with a right column of black text with some red words.

Musica Viva, 1960
Josef Müller-Brockmann (1914–96)

  • Müller-Brockmann’s evolution in style expressed through these three posters was inspired by Vivarelli, who insisted that even geometrical forms could be too subjective and that the information alone could become the image if presented harmoniously.

A poster with large black text reading Berlin across the top and above smaller black text.

Berlin, 1963
Emil Ruder (1914–70)

  • This poster promotes an exhibition about Berlin, “the largest city in Germany.”
  • It is a two-sheet, letterpress design with a combination of hand-cut lettering (Berlin), plastic type (the subheading), and metal type (the text at the lower left). The skinny, hyper-extended letterforms in the upper register combined with remarkably tight kerning give the poster a dynamism and sense of energy impossible to impart through metal type alone.

A poster with an outline of an object and various measurements.

Industrieware von Wilhelm Wagenfeld, 1960
Fridolin Müller (1926–2006)

  • This photolithographic poster advertises an exhibition of the work of Wilhelm Wagenfeld, an industrial designer from the Bauhaus school known for his sleek, pared-down home goods.
  • The mathematical breakdown of the stove pot also serves to reveal part of the complex underlying grid structure behind the poster.

A poster with black text of the alphabet in upper case and lower case.

Typographie, 1960
Robert Büchler (1914–2005)

  • This poster advertises an exhibition of 50 years of handset typography at the Gewerbemuseum in Basel. Emil Ruder based his design for the exhibition catalog on this image.
  • The visual rhythm of this composition is derived from Büchler’s separation of the upper- and lowercase vowels from the consonants, creating groupings that ultimately lead to the letter “t” for typography—the title of the show.
  • Set in Akzidenz Grotesk, this poster was printed through linoleum linocut for the main body and metal type for the smaller text at the bottom.

A poster with a large black Z on the left side of a fuzzy black and white photograph of a young boy running.

Die Zeitung, 1958
Emil Ruder (1914–70)

  • This poster promotes an exhibition of newspaper history at the Gewerbemuseum in Basel.
  • Due to the close relationship between museums and schools in Switzerland, this poster would have been executed by Ruder’s students as part of an in-class exercise, with each student working on a single element. As the school only had smaller printing presses, the poster is made up of two sheets of paper.
  • The giant “z” and the halftone image of the boy are hand-cut into linoleum, while the lower text is a combination of plastic (“die Zeitung”) and metal type. The entire piece is printed via letterpress in one lockup.

A poster of a winter landscape with a scarf folded in the formation of a cross in the center.

Winterhilfe, 1969
Ruth Pfalzberger (b. 1949)

  • This trilingual, photomontage design set in Univers announces an annual winter charity appeal. Founded in 1936, its aim is to help the poor get through the country’s harsh winters.
  • In photomontage compositions like this, the images were cut out and set on stark white backgrounds prior to printing to make them stand out.

A poster with red and black text inside a rectangle inside an abstract black shape.

Sammlung Richard Doetschbenziger, 1957
Emil Ruder (1914–70)

  • Using the simplified outline of an open book as a framing device, this poster advertises an exhibition of East Asian books and miniatures from the collection of Richard Doetschbenzinger, held one year before his death.
  • This two-sheet letterpress design was printed through a combination of hand-cut linoleum (the outline of the book and larger text) and metal type (smaller text on the right).

A poster with a large black circle in the center and red text in the upper left corner.

Schützenfest, 1963
Fridolin Müller (1926–2006)

  • Held approximately every five years, a Schützenfest is a target-shooting festival in which thousands of young men compete to be the best marksman. As all men in Switzerland must serve in the military, this is considered a national tradition dating back to the Middle Ages.
  • Müller’s stark composition uses an enlarged black circle to represent both the barrel of a gun and a target—a perfect example of minimal means with maximum expression.
  • The poster’s simple, direct design meant it could be easily translated into the other main languages of Switzerland without needing to alter the composition.

A poster with a large white lower case

Medea, 1972
Josef Müller-Brockmann (1914–96)

  • This photo-offset poster combines printed Akzidenz Grotesk type in the upper registers with a giant hand-cut “m” dominating the lower half of the page.
  • Müller-Brockmann created dozens of posters for the Zürich Opera House, almost all of which are a simple but effective combination of text and color with no pictorial image. Here, he focuses on a giant lowercase “m” to advertise a production of Medea.

A poster with a blurry photograph of a black and white ballerina dancing and large white text along the left edge.

Giselle, 1959
Armin Hofmann (1920–2020)

  • One of Hofmann’s most iconic designs, this poster promotes an outdoor performance of the ballet Giselle.
  • This is one of the many instances in which Hofmann breaks from a gridded structure in favor of design sensibility. While the majority of the text mathematically relates to the placement of other elements within the poster, the dot on top of the “i” in the title extends beyond the ascension of the letterforms. It also is round (dots and periods in most sans-serif typefaces at this time are square), cheekily nodding to where the dancer’s knee would be and cleverly tying the title to the image.
  • The title has most likely been printed from enlarged metal type that has been tightly spaced.
  • Hofmann also allows the serif on the number “1” to hang off the grid line so that the body of each number aligns with the letters below, thus creating a more satisfying visual rhythm.
  • Printed via photo-offset, the white of this poster is the actual paper. It provides a stark contrast to the gentle halftones of the nearly-abstracted photograph that elegantly suggests movement rather than the presence of a human figure.

A poster with a skinny, white, condensed capital

Junge Holländische Bildhauer, 1960
Armin Hofmann (1920–2020)

  • This letterpress poster advertises an exhibition of Dutch sculptors at the Kunsthalle Basel.
  • Slight irregularities in the giant “h” indicate that it was hand-cut in linoleum, while the lower text is most likely Haettenschweiler Schmalfette wood type (designed by Walter Haettenschweiler, a student of Ernst Keller, in 1954).

A poster with a large centered image of a golden tuba below small black text.

Ausstellung Musikinstrumente, 1962
Richard Paul Lohse (1902–88)

  • This poster promoting an exhibition of musical instruments is one of the few designs that breaks from the classic black-white-red color combination that dominates this show.
  • The position of the tuba aggressively facing the viewer flattens the instrument and emphasizes its geometric structure.
  • Note how Lohse has aligned the hours of the exhibition so that the right side of the numbers are locked to the grid, rather than the more typical left side.

Kelly Walters

Assistant Professor, Communication Design, Parsons School of Design

What happens when you apply the grid to different source material? Kelly Walters works with her students to bring cultural references into the classroom in order to represent the emerging field more accurately and find new ways to challenge and manipulate the grid.

New Perspectives on Teaching Design

Shani Sandy

Design Executive, IBM

Shani Sandy has been working to expand the pipeline of BIPOC designers, partially through the creation of a timeline of pioneers and forebears in the field during the height of modern graphic design and the Bauhaus.

An Open Letter

Acknowledgments

The collection of posters comes to Poster House through a generous loan from Tom Strong.

Exhibition Curation by

Angelina Lippert

Contributions by

Audrey Bennett
Ramon Tejada
Kelly Walters
Shani Sandy
Curry Hackett

Special Thanks to

Michele Washington
Paul Shaw
Alexander Tochilovsky
Greg D’Onofrio
Patricia Belen
Jean Daniel-Clerc

#PHSwissGrid

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