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.

Dokumenta 1955 and Ernst Keller, the Pioneer of Swiss Graphic Design

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Dokumenta 1955. We walked through the rubble of Kassel in Germany only to be blown away by a fantastic show of art in this museum. It was here that I discovered Max Beckmann and the German Expressionists, along with so much more. I took the photo because of the terrific posters and how full of life and excitement they were in contrast to the somber mood of the architecture however much it might have been spared from the Allied bombing raids of World War II.

Coat of arms of the city of Zurich designed by Keller.

Ernst Keller (1891-1968) was a giant in the pantheon of great Swiss graphic designers. From 1918, at the age of 27, through 1956 he taught students in Zurich's famous Kunstgewerbeschule, or School of Applied Art, so well that he can be called the father of the Swiss school of graphics. The birthplace was the Swiss National Exhibition of 1939 in Zurich. A shy man who shunned personal publicity, he avoided a recognizable style preferring instead to approach each design challenge within the requirements of its individual needs.

Willy Rotzler writes of him in Graphis 184 in 1976 that "He was instilled with the belief that every piece of graphic design ought, over and above the its immediate purpose, to be an improvement of our visual environment. It the final analysis it was this fundamental ethical principle that lent lasting value to the work of his pupils, making Swiss graphics not merely the name of a style, but a seal of quality."

Well, amen to that. That is totally the opposite of what copiers of that style have done. My pet peeve is setting English language copy in three blocks of text just because the Swiss have done it. Hello? They have to do it because they speak three languages in that small country.

Keller's adaptation of Swiss cantonal coats of arms for the facade of the Swiss Life Insurance and Pension Company building in Zurich. He actually cut and carved these designs in wood prior to fabrication.

Poster for the Reitberg Museum of Zurich created by Keller as a five-color linoleum print. Thanks to Walter Herdeg's Graphis 184 for the bottom two images above and selections from the text of ERNST KELLER. The Pioneer of Swiss Graphic Design.

Driving in Switzerland by Design

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Swiss traffic used to look a lot like this when there was much less traffic. The signage is what was important. It was clear, crisp, and in the right place. This photo was taken in downtown Zurich among the big department stores.

Easy to follow directions to drive out of the city.

Swiss lady traffic cop. Note the directional sign so handy she can point to it. She's wearing huge wide gloves and a black Swiss version of a ten-gallon Stetson.

Close up of the above, with apologies for the fuzziness. You can only get so much out of a Kodachrome.

Parking meters were readily identified.

User friendly and well designed.

Parking garages were also readily found. Follow the arrow.

To pay, there was a large vending machine with instructions in four languages.

Even match books located where to park a car.

Even at the top of the St. Gotthard Pass the same signage indicated where to park.

Conveniently located nearby was an emergency phone and the ubiquitous abfallen basket for trash.

Illuminated destination signs were attractive and strategically placed. No mystery about where you were. You had better keep your speed to 60 km/hour in the city of Muralto, in the province of Ticino.

Swissair had it all

Once upon a time in the middle of the last century, just about fifty years ago, it was really a pleasure to fly -- particularly as a passenger on Swissair. There even was a direct flight from Boston to Zurich. I remember seeing the CEO of Polaroid across the aisle in economy class. It was that good.

Swissair's graphics and promo were the best in the world. This is one of their posters promoting travel to Japan. Click on this and the other images to enlarge them.

Swissair ticket folder. Notice that all the sell is confined to the inside.

Equipment Swissair flew at the time, from one of their postcards.

One of the earlier Swissair prop planes.

Swissair routes worldwide.

Passenger promo material. Those are oversize post cards, beautiful photos and great printing.

Litttle boxes of almonds served before dinner with beverage of your choice, as offered by attractive young female flight attendants. No, I'm not a sexist but you should know that at the same time U.S. airlines were under pressure to hire older women who could be, on occasion, nags and scolds.

Just think of it, decent champagne as well!

Dinner menus! Remember, this was in economy class.

They were having lobster in First. I swear.

Swissair newspaper in at least three languages with tourist information.

And a gratis carry-off bag.

The Golden Age of Type Design: Origins

The Panthenon in Rome with its impeccable frieze of capital letters identifying the emperor Agrippa who built the first one. This is the second Pantheon, built by Hadrian in A.D. 125 and dedicated to Agrippa.

Classic Roman letters from marble slabs seen in the Roman Forum in 1955.

Example of letterpress printing found in the Swiss publication Typografie published circa 1950. I sold my copy on eBay several years ago but not before photographing this and the following examples on Kodachrome. Didy was/is a flower shop in Lucerne.

Edler was a schmuck? No, schmuck is German for jeweler.

Bottle label for Swiss kirschwasser, distilled from cherries, and drunk as a digestive and with cheese fondue throughout Switzerland. I particularly love it on a ripe fruit Macedonia and on ice cream. But I digress. . .

Swiss burghers as I saw them at meal times in Switzerland staring as they so often did at a young American couple and wondering what they were doing eating in the same restaurants as they.

But I was young and given to playing with my food, I guess.

Origins of good design and illustration from Lautrec and Hohlwein

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The most outstanding poster designer and illustrator in the early days of lithography was Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec 1864-1901.

There were others, such as Jules Cheret 1836-1932, and Alfons Mucha 1860-1939. I mention them only because their work has been widely reproduced and flogged by shopping mall poster shops and Internet vendors. I've linked them as an important part of the history of lithography but they were not in the same league as Lautrec, who is a giant and an icon for this period of art history.

Lithography owes its origins to the struggles of an unsuccessful writer, Alois Senefelder 1771-1834, who discovered how to make lithographs in 1796. It was a major accomplishment, the first significant invention in the printing industry since the 15th century. Posters reproduced in color were now possible and bridged the gap between fine art of the galleries and museums and the commercial art of the streets and boulevards.

A Swiss poster of a later period, date and illustrator unknown.

A poster promoting winter travel and sports in St. Moritz, Switzerland, date and illustrator unknown.

Later on, another giant emerged in the person of Ludwig Hohlwein of Munich, Germany, 1874-1949. The link will connect you with examples and comments about his work which were among the first subjects uploaded in this web log.

A poster for travel to Berchtesgarden, Germany, exact date unknown.

A poster promoting travel to Wiesbaden, Germany, exact date unknown.

I don't think anyone could depict exotic women as well as Hohlwein. This ad for chocolate is one of my favorites, exact date unknown.