{"id":48495,"date":"2018-01-02T08:03:54","date_gmt":"2018-01-02T16:03:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/creativemarket.com\/blog\/?p=48495"},"modified":"2024-04-17T00:35:04","modified_gmt":"2024-04-17T07:35:04","slug":"swiss-design-history-examples","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/creativemarket.com\/blog\/swiss-design-history-examples","title":{"rendered":"Swiss Design: History, Examples, and Fonts to Inspire Your Work"},"content":{"rendered":"

You’d be hard-pressed to find another school of design that has had so much profound influence on the development of graphic design throughout the 20th<\/sup> century as the Swiss has. Because of this distinction, chances are great that you’ve already seen numerous examples of Swiss in various forms of graphic design, unbeknownst to you!\nSwiss Design is <\/strong>widely admired for its clean lines, objectivity, and readability. It has enjoyed massive impact on graphic design as a whole, especially with the modernist movement. A study in minimalism, Swiss Design tended to emphasize typography in its works.\nIn this primer on this style, you’ll learn everything from its roots and memorable examples to breathtaking fonts and everything in between.\n

<\/span>The History of Swiss Design<\/span><\/h2>

\nDesign is regarded as a communication medium, first and foremost. Swiss Design intended to showcase information more objectively, liberated from any associated meanings. In this context, this graphic design style is one for the purists.\n<\/p>

<\/span>Early Days<\/span><\/h3>

\nTo discover this movement’s roots, we have to travel all the way back to 1896, when the Berlin-based Berthold Type Foundry<\/a> came out with its Akzidenz Grotesk Typeface<\/a> in an effort to—you guessed it—represent an objective design style. This event was the spark that led to the evolution of what would eventually become the Swiss style: a movement interested in communicating its message clearly and in a way that was universally direct.\n\"\"\nTwo main Swiss design schools are directly praiseworthy for their contributions to Swiss’ expansion. First, the Basel Design School<\/em>, in 1908, took matters into its own hands. It adjusted one of its foundational courses after taking inspiration from a grid work-based graphic-design method that started in the 19th<\/sup> century.\n<\/p>

<\/span>A Philosophy Takes Shape<\/span><\/h3>

\nA decade later in 1918, Kunstgewerbeschule Zürich, Switzerland’s biggest arts university, hired Ernst Keller as a professor. He promptly started development on a typography and graphic design course. Keller was preoccupied with teaching his students an approach to style that emphasized a unique philosophy at the time.\n\"\"\nHe believed that design solutions should come from the design problems<\/em> themselves. This philosophy is extremely interesting because it represents an intentional rebellion against previous design schools of thought that stressed beauty for no other reason than for beauty itself—which doesn’t always lead to the best and most functional design solutions.\nThis rebellion against style over substance is one that has repeated itself throughout design history, with the most prominent, recent example occurring in web design in our time. When Apple rejected skeuomorphic design<\/a> (designing user-interface graphics like icons and buttons to resemble their real-life counterparts) in favor of today’s flat and minimalist design<\/a>, they did so with the implicit message that they were moving away from the excesses of skeuomorph. Skeuomorphism was routinely criticized for being a design style that was more about appearance than function.\n<\/p>

<\/span>Helvetica and Swiss Design’s Growth<\/span><\/h3>

\nLet’s fast-forward to the 1950s. This decade saw more powerful growth for Swiss. It saw the consolidation of Swiss’ unique design elements into sans-serif<\/a> typefaces such as Univers<\/a>. Univers’ development was the pivotal touchstone that then gave the world one of the most beloved and widely used typefaces ever: Helvetica.<\/em> After Univers, a Swiss typeface designer named Max Miedinger and his collaborator, Edouard Hoffman, took inspiration from it and came up with Helvetica, originally known as “Neue Haas Groteskâ€.\nBoth Univers and Helvetica were the results of a design movement that sought to capitalize on the resurgence of grotesque font families in the design houses of Europe at the time. This is evident in the original name of Helvetica.\n\"\"\nThe typographers designing Helvetica<\/a> had the following goals:\n<\/p>