--|| Tehran International Poster Biennial 2004 ||-- Young Swiss Graphic Design

The 8th Tehran International Poster Biennial, 15 February - 15 April 2004, Tehran, Iran. Deadline: 31 October 2003. Organized by Iranian Graphic Designers Society (IGDS). Endorsed by Icograda.

home . Background . The regulations and forms . International Jury . Accompanying exhibitions . Sponsors . News . Awards . Contact us

Young Swiss Graphic Design Exhibition
Young Swiss Graphic Design Exhibition, Lecture and Workshop:
Melk Imboden, Martin Wootdli, Megi Zumstein
From February 16 to April 16, 2004
The Gallery of Felstin Cinema
112 Saba Street, Taleghani Avenue, Tehran-Iran.
Tel: 98 (21) 649 81 26
Open Sunday to Friday, 10 am to 7 pm


New Swiss Style
by Meret Ernst
English translation by Margie Mounier

There was clearly a rational undertone to the type of design cultivated by the mid-20th-century graphic designers of Switzerland. In a book that looks back over his life, Josef Muller-Brockmann remembers his feelings on the subject of the possible founding of a review for new graphic design: "I was convinced that the future lay with an objectively informative design mentality." The triumph of the modular screen over symmetrical typography, photography over drawn illustrations, and Helvetica typeface over Times all contributed to promoting this objective style abroad, where it met with immediate and overwhelming success. Soon it acquired the trademark denomination Swiss Typography or Swiss Style. Thus, during the seventies, it was enough for a graphic designer to have accomplished his or her training with Basel's Emil Ruder or Armin Hofman to be guaranteed a job - not only in the United States but just as well anywhere else in the world. Until the day when ads began appearing that explicitly sought out candidates who were "not too Swiss"! The reasons for such a stipulation remain open to conjecture. Then again, all that goes up, perforce must come down.

The influence of the Swiss Style beyond the seventies and eighties has made itself felt not only in the curriculum of Switzerland's renowned applied arts schools, the typographic grid system, and even the Swiss nation's corporate identity. It is also reflected in the biographies of designers who repudiated that style's very axioms, like Wolfgang Weingart with his experimental typography. And it crops up again in the work of the younger generation of designers, who work at a flexible remove from the Swiss style. Typical of the popular post-modern approach, everything can now be combined with everything, reevaluated and reinterpreted. The world is a pool of shared interests. Graphic design of our day has no avant-gardist pretentions, nor does it claim to embody the latest truth. What matters is working with, and on, one's personal perception - such as it is distillated, reduced, subjected to irony and overlaid with extraneous material. There is a new concern with the sort of tradition from which the designer him- or herself is descended. The graphic designer Cornel Windlin comes to mind, for instance, with his take on Max Bill's classic logo design for the furniture shop Wohnbedarf (1931) as the basis of his own "Supermax" font in 1998.

Nowadays, computers are already part and parcel of graphic design training. Renouncing the screen is therefore a deliberate decision taken in all due consciousness not only of digital technologyصs possibilities, but also of its limits. During the nineties, it was mainly commissions arising from the cultural realm that granted graphic designers the liberty to carry out their own designs and use the medium of their choice. Party flyers, calling cards, books, magazines, entrance tickets, CD covers, CD-ROMS, posters and fonts represent, for the most part, a lifestyle belonging to those commissioning the projects - ideally, "friends who can pay," as the Zurich design practice Electrosmog notes. In this realm, the approach to a work's legibility takes a new twist: Communication comes across iconically - labels have more weight than long texts. As such, they define affiliations, and target insiders.

Although belief in a universally valid visual sign language is crumbling, the pool from which today's young graphic designers draw inspiration and the mediums that they employ imply the existence of something like an international "off-graphic design" scene. This may have something to do with the fact that the attending circumstances are alike when today's young graphic designers forego a project explicitly destined to serve a cause, in favor of one quite ambiguously termed "d'auteur." Attitude over service: Such a way of thinking, freeing graphic design from its tethers, is reflected in current creative endeavor. And this in the very same way that Swiss Typography sought to rise above mere service by incorporating an attitude.

Melk Imboden
by Philippe Apeloig, Professor for graphic design at the Cooper Union School of Art, New York

Our world today is populated with countless advertising images made up to photographs, cartoon strips, drawing, television spots, web banners, and every combination thereof. Most of this imagery is produced in the most expedient manner, with weak, if not downright poor, graphic composition. Melchior Imboden creates images for public consumption from pure graphic elements. He rarely uses photographs and employs little or no color, relying upon the impact of type and form instead. His abilities to use and manipulate visual illusion and kinetic effect have led to remarkable and highly memorable compositions. One could say that Imboden's work borders on illegibility, but there is no doubt that it is visually arresting.
His posters are abstract, minimal, repetitive, and succinctly express a very modern vision of graphic design. Imboden has won many awards for his new vision of graphic design. Imboden has made a substantial advance in the area of two dimensional design. His posters, in their experimental boldness and typographic extremity, approach a new form, almost a new medium. Design history has shown us that form can be much more expressive than discourse or text alone.

Martin Woodtli
Martin Woodtli Martin Woodtli is perhaps the most accomplished representative of the new design scene in Switzerland, where the joy of the design process (as opposed to monetary reward) seems to determine the direction of the studios. Swiss designers would rather work for small cultural projects to which they are often connected personally than to fall into the trap of large advertising conglomerates. While at first glance this may seem to be a complete break with all traditions of the famed Swiss International Style, the roots of the new generation are still firmly grounded in the world of Brockmann and Bill.
Woodtli does not subscribe to the silly adage circulated by many of his colleagues about the computer being just a tool; he sees it simply as a process. He is also the only person I know who can actually think with the keyboard. His proficiency in various programs is such that he sketches with the keyboard as quickly and uninhibitedly as with pencil and paper. Having worked with many artists within the art market, he has no interest in following them but happily remains in the design world. He considers graphic design a "wonderful medium in which you can create friction within the existing world." To work within that world, to intervene and throw it just slightly out of balance, is his biggest challenge.
Woodtli is obsessive. He seems to have taken to heart that line from Brian Eno's diary that a good way to create something original is to do something so incredibly painstaking and time-consuming that nobody else bothers. Woodtli notes, "Sixteen-square-foot black painting made with a very fine (6H) pencil would qualify." Woodtli's black squares manifest themselves in complex typographic plays and manically layered, dense patterns of everyday objects produced in perplexingly exact silk screens. After spending a couple of months as an intern in my New York studio, he returned to Switzerland, buried himself in a two-year excess of work, and created a beautifully conceived monograph. He also became the youngest member of Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI), that most venerable group of the international design establishment.
I knew I was old when our intern became an AGI member.

by Stefan Sagmeister, area: 100 graphic designers - 010 curators - 010 design classics; Phaidon; 2003

Megi Zumstein
Awards:
Swiss Federal Competition of Design 2002, Scholarship at GTF, London; Nomination for the exhibition European Way(s) of Life 2002, Paris; Nomination for the Lucky Strike Junior Designer Award Switzerland, 2001; Encouraging award 2001 of the Hochschule fur Gestaltung und Kunst, Zurich

Exhibitions:
Swiss Federal Office of Culture; Swiss Design 2002: Netzwerke Reseaux Networks; October 19th 2002-January 12th 2003, Museum for Design, Zurich; Cantonal Encouraging Commission Obwalden Exhibition of degree works of 5 graduates from Obwalden (County) of the Hochschulen fur Gestaltung und Kunst Luzern and Zurich; June 1th-30th 2002, Sarnen; SAD Societe des Artistes Decorateurs, Paris; European Way(s) of Life; May 4th-12th 2002, Caroussel du Louvre, Paris.

home . Background . The regulations and forms . International Jury . Accompanying exhibitions . Sponsors . News . Awards . Contact us