Jan Tschichold was a graphic designer from the 20th century and was one of the first to reject the traditional use of fonts and started embracing sans-serif typefaces, geometric construction, and asymmetrical composition. Tshihold left Germany in 1930 due to the Nazi regime and moved to Basel School, which was heavily influenced by the Bauhaus. Tshihold is arguably one of the most influential people from the 20th century. He is most known for the redesign of the cover for “The Penguin Books”, which was an incredibly popular horizontal book. He used symmetry, alignment and negative space to create this.
During the Swiss Movement the a lot of the most used typefaces were created, Helvetica. Helvetica is the most solid, reliable typeface. It is easy to read with high x-height and small spacing between letters, this is one of the most famous and favourited typefaces of all time. There was actually a movie made about the typeface called “what did Helvetica tell you today?”, where it shows all the different things we see on a daily that use Helvetica as their chosen font.
Ruder and Hoffman were both Swiss designers, who joined the faculty of the Basel School of Design. They were pioneers of the Swiss style movement and were heavily influenced by uses of grid systems and typography. They were inspired by Tshiholds New Typogrpahy and the principles of Bauhaus. Hoffman would mostly use geometric shapes and grids to create his designs, his simplistic work was emphasised by the point, line and plane method. He also used black and white photography that would also be seen as abstract.
Emil Ruder had a holistic approach to his art, that uses philsophy. His idea was that typography was to communicate ideas through writing. His art used grid systems as well but majorly focused on typography and alligned text.
He was very influencial 20th century designer, another theorist of Swiss Design. He invented the grid system for grid based design. His best work is very minimalist and uses Typography. He liked to use geometric shapes, mostly plane, to create his designs.
Pentagram is the worlds largest independent design consultancy, it is a multi disciplinary design studio that covers topics such as graphics and identity, products, packaging, exhibitions and more! It is a world famous design house that is ran currently by 24 individual designers that work collaboratively or independently where they share the profit, loss and decision-making. The company has opened multiple different offices across the world, in some of the biggest cities which are London, New York, San Francisco, Berlin and Texas.
IDEO is a design consultancy that major around design thinking. They take a human and planet centred approach to by applying creative mindsets. They create products that are benefical and safe for eveuone, they have great influence on other designers to keep things such as climate change in mind. One of their projects is future thinking, for example future of air travel where they come up with ways to make it less damaging. They have studios in North America (Cambridge, Chicago, San Francisco), Europe (London, Munich) and Asia (Shanghai, Tokyo),
Crowel was a Dutch designer in the 20th century, he had a six decade career, in which he created typefaces, designed posters, was a teacher and a museum director. His work was inspired by the Swiss Style. His posters were very organised and clean, he used grid systems, abstraction, geometric shapes, which all follow mathematical styles. His work was unique as he used bold and bright colours which was quite uncommon compared to others.