Module 8

What I found intriguing about this weeks reading was the evolution of a artistic movement based on a mainstreaming of Typography. Most of the movements we have learned about have referred to graphics or images and the styles and techniques that were grouped together. It's refreshing to have a movement based around communicating with words in a clear way.

Swiss Modernism was a movement that emphasized communication over the attention grabbing of advertisements. It is fitting then that as the world began to move closer to the modern era and the world began to grow smaller with the development of mass communications that the International Typographic Style would arise.

Note the lack of serifs and the boldness of the type, communication is the key function.

A forerunner of the movement, Amil Ruder a typography instructor of the Basel School of Design taught that legibility and readability are dominant concerns and that type loses its purpose if it loses its communicative meaning.

The fonts in this movement epitomized this ideal. In 1954 Adrian Frutiger completed Univers a font with 21 variations.

This era was also the orgin of the popular font Helvetica, which is a traditional Latin name for Switzerland.

German designer Hermann Zapf would evolve traditions of calligraphy and Renaissance Typography into three typefaces that would also exemplify the movement 

Melior

Optima

And Palationo