I Heart Design

no. 78

SELECTED BYCHRIS PULLMANMUSICA VIVADESIGNED BYJOSEF MÜLLER-BROCKMAN

In the mid-’60s, when I was just learning about design and typography at Yale, Modernism was the style du jour. I was intellectually turned on by the minimalism (one font, usually Akzidenz in just a few sizes), the rules (flush left, ragged right, the logic of the grid), and the idea of a “universal” aesthetic where content of any variety could be accommodated in this rational system.

Switzerland was then the mecca of European Modernism, and Joseph Müller-Brockmann, one if its key practitioners, had just published what might have been the first pedagogical book on the subject: The Graphic Artist and His Design Problems.

I opened it up and there on page 124 was this amazing ...