100 Years of Illustration

The Good, the Very Good, and the Ugly of Design 1977

A Swiss poster announcing an exhibit of Alexander Calder sculptures

Swiss poster for a venue featuring the clown Dmitri.

Great Swiss package design for some great Swiss chocolate almond candy.

Swedish, not Swiss, but a fabulous soap folding box.

Posters promoting the annual Basel fair. Does this look too much like a magazine ad?

Here comes the descent into banal, 1977 posters for a soft drink with a tradition of great poster advertising.

Down the slippery slope they went. What ever happened to the classy Swiss use of typography?

Finally, you know when the banks lose their restraint in Switzerland, the game is over -- and lost.
A pity it was but we won't belabor the point anymore except to say The End, Finis, Auf wiederluaga, Ciao.

Swiss Posters -- More

Click on images to enlarge them.

These also were photographed as 35mm. Kodachromes on site around 50 years ago give or take a year or two.

Wonderful fashion photo for a famous furrier.

Poster for Clementine, a boutique.

Poster for Milva, an Italian singer, actress and television personality, for a Berthold Brecht recital.

Riri makes zippers.

Poster for a venue from Madrid.

Poster for an exhibit of pencil and ink drawings.

Poster for an exhibit of the work of Natale Sapone.

Swiss Posters

Click on images to enlarge them.

These were all photographed as 35mm. Kodachromes on site around 50 years ago give or take a year or two.

Beyer is a famous shop on the Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich.

The classy watch theme is carried on in the shop's signage as well.

A poster for the Kantonalbank of Zurich.

This poster warning motorists to stop for young children crossing in front of them. The "L" is indicates new drivers and I think in this case means children learning to use pedestrian crosswalks.

This advertises dates for the famous Knie circus.

A show of paintings by the great British painter J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) at the Kunsthaus in Zurich.

Poster for a show of West African tribal masks.

Poster announcing a show of the typographic work of Jan Tschishold (1902-1974), typographer, book designer, teacher and writer, at the Zurich school for graphic design.

Sorry, I wish I could translate the text but it's obviously about a venue at the Zurich music hall.

Commemorating May Day, labor's holiday throughout Europe.

Swiss Hotels

Click on photos to enlarge them. This is the Hotel Sonne-Terminus or Hotel du Soleil, in French, in the Swiss city of Glarus, on the highway from Zurich to the Saint Gottard Pass. It was my favorite because of the ambience and Papa Frohlich's wonderful geschnetzle and roesti. There are plenty of modern hotels in Switzerland but these are worth the effort it takes to find them, as they vanish from the landscape.

A welcome invitation and flowers for the room.

Elsewhere a basket of ripe fruit to enjoy.

And, of course, a splendid breakfast to start each day. I have to confess that this photo was taken in Merano in the Italian South Tirol, but it is similar to the Swiss with a slightly different version of croissants and crusty rolls, and every bit as appetizingly visual as well as delicious.

The Swiss Post Office

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Illuminated sign taken as a night time exposure with my elbow braced against a wall so there's some camera shake evident. However, it's a pretty neat design for the 1950s.

This is either the post office in Morges or Lausanne, both on Lac Leman up the lake from Geneva. My young wife and I lived in the maid's quarters of a villa in a village near Morges where we froze in winter. It's a good thing we knew how to take a G.I. shower with the stingy amount of hot water we got.

The Swiss phone system is part of the Swiss Postal Service. We should have such good service and clean, modern facilities here in the USA where it is rare to actually find a phone booth that hasn't been trashed or a mail box. Today you can use credit cards to call home from Swiss phone booths.

In 1959 I drove my VW beetle to the Geneva airport to send artwork out to Scholastic Magazines and to Polaroid Corporation, both clients at the time we were in Switzerland. The work got to its destination the next day or the following one. Swissair had just put into service the new French Caravelle jets and they were something to see roaring down the runway.

More Swiss stamps.

Greeting card with illustration of a couple dancing in the cantonal costume of Graubunden. I think I bought this at our village Swiss post office.