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Edited by the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich Essay by Thomas Macho and contributions by Christian Brändle, Sabina Brändli, Bettina Richter, Nicolas Righetti, Ulrich Schmid, Francesco Vezzoli, Klaus Waschik

16,5 x 24 cm, 192 pages, 200 illustrations German English

Politicians are omnipresent in our society. How they present themselves depends on historical context as well as on the prevailing form of government and cultural environment. Vital components of political work are image building, political advertising, election campaigns, and self-representation, but also the tearing down of one’s opponent. The exchange between politicians and the people is marked by a complex disparity. While politicians seek to rally broad sectors of the population behind their programs, they only engage sporadically in a genuine exchange with individuals. This publication illuminates historical roots, epoch-making election campaigns, recurrent patterns in political public relations, and defining figures such as Lenin, Che Guevara, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Yulia Tymoshenko.

Edited by the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich Essay by Martin Heller

16,5 x 24 cm, 96 pages, 97 illustrations German English

Otto Baumberger (1889–1961) was one of the first Swiss "poster designers" and helped to modernize the medium. Baumberger was far ahead of his time in recognizing fundamental aspects of consumer goods advertising. His original graphic creations led to a reduction bordering on abstraction, in which graphic and textual elements underwent an increasingly potent synthesis. Thus, in its variety, Baumberger’s work embodies and exemplifies the history of Swiss poster art in the first half of the twentieth century, as the painterly artist poster gradually evolved toward graphically oriented corporate design.

Essay by Nanni Baltzer

16,5 x 24 cm, 96 pages, 150 colour illustrations German English

The focus is on eight graphic artists chosen to exemplify today consciously, using photography and type as their means of expression. In the posters of Michal Batory, Cyan, Werner Jeker, M/M (Paris), Gerwin Schmidt, Skolos/Wedell, Leonardo Sonnoli, and Tschumi, Küng, it becomes clear that different visual conceptions can have different consequences for the use of photography, and can conceal different attitudes towards graphic design.

16,5 x 24 cm, 96 pages, 103 colour illustrations German English

Connections between the graphic language of comics and that of the poster can be identified in terms of both form and content. Even though the sequential pictorial narrative of the comic strip is condensed into an individual image appropriate to the poster’s frame, the narrative approach remains comparable: humor, and a vivid overdrawing in a constant mixture of reality and fiction are typical features. The appropriation of specific design elements characteristic of comics for use as pictorial codes is starting to be taken for granted in contemporary posters. Besides of historical examples the books includes works by contemporary graphic designers such as Exem, Anke Feuchtenberger, Flag, Happypets Products, M/M, Alex Trüb, Martin Woodtli, Cornel Windlin.

Posters from the turbulent 80es in Switzerland

Texts by Martin Jaeggi and Peter Schweiger German English
16,5 x 24,0 cm, 80 pages, 120 color ills, Softcover

With their atmosphere of sociopolitical ferment, the 1980s also witnessed the appearance of a new aesthetic in Swiss graphic design. Most of the posters exhibited here were advertisements for events in the context of alternative culture. A compative élan is palpable in their visual idiom, as is a rejection of the codes of consumer culture, which makes it clear that it was about more than culture. The posters and their visual language signal the existence of other ideas of culture in the public arena, of a Switzerland beyond the mainstream. With posters from 1980 to 1995, this publication presents a heterogeneous collection of design attitudes that consciously break the rules. Included are works by Peter Bäder, Polly Bertram and Daniel Volkart, Richard Feurer, Roli Fischbacher, Cornel Windlin, Ruedi Wyss, and others.

In coproduction with Grafiksammlung

With texts by Hans Höger, Barbara Junod and Bettina Richter
16,5 x 24 cm, 96 pages, 100 colour illustrations German English

Entrepreneurial initiative, social openness and cultural diversity meant that Milan before and above all after the Second World War was absolutely predestined to develop the effervescent cultural climate that was shaped and created in a quite crucial way by graphic designers from Switzerland. From 1947, many Milan companies employed intellectuals and artists in the newly created advertising and communications departments. Olivetti, like Pirelli, La Rinascente and other progressive firms also promoted the development of conventional commercial graphics to a broadly based visual communication concept that tried to combine aesthetic quality with ethical values. The interplay between Italian and Swiss graphic artists was important for this process. In post-war Milan there was a lack of experts. Swiss designers, who had been soundly trained as well as having an eye schooled by Constructivism, were therefore welcome. They found an inspiring intellectual climate in Milan, and professional colleagues whose undogmatic attitude conveyed a fresh creative impetus. Rational calculation and formal austerity were mingled with imagination, poetry and experimental curiosity. Included are works by Walter Ballmer, Franco Grignani, Max Huber, Felix Humm, Ruedi Külling, Lora Lamm, Serge Libiszewski, Carlo Vivarelli, and others.

Essay by Eva Lüdi Kong

16,5 x 24 cm, 64 pages, 78 colour illustrations German English

Typo China is a collection of contemporary posters from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. The economic opening has awakened interest in the poster as a dynamic medium for visual communication. With growing self-confidence, designers are attracting attention with innovative posters on cultural themes. The frequency with which they make writing and typography the main focus of posters is impressive evidence of a desire to make the most out of the invaluable wealth of their own culture of writing. Typo China makes a critical contribution to the discussion of Chinese design production.

With essays by Henri Gaudin and Catherine de Smet

16,5 x 24 cm, 64 pages, 48 colour illustrations German English French

Catherine Zask counts among France’s major graphic artists. Her typographical culture posters are distinguished by unusual typeface handling. Their formal language seems exciting and alien, particularly to eyes accustomed to the Swiss graphic heritage. Zask was born in Paris in 1961. She imbues her letters with an authority that is usually only conferred on images. It can trigger movements or echoes, affect the spaces in between the letters, store images – but it always works to create an appropriate and comprehensible form for a statement. Her posters for the French society of multimedia artists, Scam, and for the L’Hippodrome theatre in Douai, confirm the coherence and elegance of an oeuvre that is being presented in Switzerland for the first time.

Essay by Claude Lichtenstein

16,5 x 24 cm, 96 pages, 140 colour illustrations German English

Even after the emergence of clean digital design, graphic artists still like to get their hands dirty. Poster Collection 11: Handmade, the latest in the series from the poster collection of the Zurich Museum für Gestaltung, presents both international and Swiss works whose makers have used their own hands for a variety of reasons—autonomy, spontaneity, independence, or delight in experiment. This might manifest itself in turning the current idiom on its head with analogue processing of a digital aesthetic or, more radically still, in the inclusion of solids and other material in the making of the poster or in duplicating by hand. Nevertheless, these works are a long way away from retro-romanticism. Contemporary, cuttingedge design arbiters like Stefan Sagmeister and Cornel Windlin show you how it’s done. With an essay by

With Texts by Anita Kühnel, Felix Studinka, Stefan Zweifel Coproduction with Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kunstbibliothek

16,5 x 24 cm, 96 pages, german, english, 110 colour reproductions

In the fifties Engelmann set about expunging any trace of empty bourgeois enthusiasm from advertising by applying a strictly conceptual working approach. In his posters for Pirelli, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Renault or Roth Händle, images and ideas come together in a way that is as simple as it is compelling, creating signs of great associative force. He made a highly regarded contribution to graphics' breakthrough into the age of mass communications with wit and a sense of using his resources economically. The present publication brings together numerous posters by this graphic artist, who died in 1966 at the age of only 38.

With an essay by Massin

16.5 x 24 cm, 64 pages 70 illustrations, e/g

“With every new project Schraivogel gives the impression of calling his past experience into queston. Therefore, from one poster to the next, there exists great – and sometimes rather unsettling – diversity, as if differenz artists werde involved. Sometimes the typography takes pride of place, other times the illustration Other times still, the two are mixed, the lettering and the drawing enextricably linked.” Massin

With an essay by Lars Müller

16.5 x 24 cm, 80 pages 107 Illustrations, softcover German English

With an essay by Steven Heller

16,5 x 24 cm, 80 pages, g/e, 110 illustrations

After completing an apprenticeship in lithography, Armin Hofmann (born 1920) began teaching his own typographic principles at the Basel School of Design in 1947. He and his collegues who contributed to the development of Swiss international Style, advocated a belief in absolute and universal graphic expres-sion. Hofmann has also taught at Yale and the Philadelphia Museum School of the Arts. In 1965 he wrote the «Graphic Design Manual», which is regarded as a fundamental work in the field of modern graphic design and art. Poster Collection 07 gathers the most important posters of Armin Hofmann, and shows them – corresponding to his fundamental importance as a graphic design teacher – in a context with works from his most famous students, who continued his methods, as there are Nelly Rudin, Karl Gerstner, Pierre Mendell, Klaus Oberer, Gérard Ifert and others.

With an essay by Nigel Barley

16,5 x 24 cm / 96 pages / 130 poster images German English

Ever since the AIDS epidemic struck, the health authority's task of educating the public has gained dramatically in significance. In many countries, the poster as a medium of information was unknown before the advent of AIDS so that a visual vocabulary first had to be developed for an issue saddled with ingrained taboos. A survey of current posters on AIDS prevention, displayed in Asia, the Pacific and Africa, demonstrates that the urgent and imperative success of the posters depends on their being rooted in local traditions. Thus, in AIDS campaigns, posters once again perform their original function as a means of mass communication. “With a disease involving sexuality, a continuing issue is what can actually be shown, and the results often leave audiences to do quite a lot of the work themselves. Impact and inexplicitness compete and jostle each other. Typically, attempts to create a series of explicit visual signs always flounder when it comes to sex.” (Nigel Barley)

With an essay by Andres Janser

16,5 x 24 cm / 64 pages / 85 illus. German English

“Typotecture” takes a look at posters from various countries and periods, which share a special feature of typography: the tendency to break out of the two-dimensional space of lettering and establish hybrid links with architecture. Letters, words, or entire sentences form architectural figures, which can be read both as pictures and as words. The playful handling of typography has led to an exhilarating wealth of variations in the history of poster art. Starting with contemporary poster design, the widely divergent strands of development in the architectural treatment of lettering are traced back in time through the twentieth century.

With contributions by Bettina Richter, André Vladimir Heiz, Harald Szeemann

16,5 x 24 cm / 96 pages/ 139 poster images German English

Hors-Sol is a record of poster actions conducted by fine artists in public places in Switzerland, starting with the sensational campaign mounted by the Zurich Concrete Artists in 1961. The poster is usually a medium for commercial messages, but here it is used to convey new meanings, some of which are more firmly anchored in the context of art, others explicitly aimed at advertising. These unusual intrusions are disturbing and cause people to reflect on the conditions in which art and PR function. In historical comparison, they function as a mirror of the time and reveal a great deal about changing social conditions. The poster campaigns that took place in the 1960s seemed to be impressively explosive and alarmingly direct, whereas today's artistic forays into the poster as a medium are evidence that PR aesthetics and the art world are coming into line.

Mit einem Essay von Stuart Bailey

16,5 x 24 cm / 96 pages / 153 poster images German English

"The more I spoke to those involved with the posters and policies of the Museum für Gestaltung, I realised that their contrariness is the main reason they are consistently effective. They achieve an identitiy through non-identity. Cultivated over many decades, this tradition is delicate. It is not too difficult to imagine an injection of marketing sensibilities - of being good for the man on the street, or easily recognisable / understandable, of dumbing down, of patronising - destroying everrything in one fatal campaign". (Stuart Bailey)

With an essay by Jean Charles Giroud (BPU, Genf)

16,5 x 24 cm, 64 pages / 69 poster images in color German English

Donald Brun (1909-1999) was one of the most successful Swiss graphic artists of his days. So why are people sometimes embarrassed when he is mentioned? Brun was the first of a line of designers who thought conceptually and self-confidently within the parameters of the market-place. And thus, at a very high level, he revealed the dubious morality surrounding the "good and beautiful poster" - and it is precisely this phenomenon that deserves our attention.

With an essay by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Stanford University, CA)

16,5 x 24 cm, 64 pages, German/English 91 posters images in color

Anyone who immerses himself in a room, a set of surroundings, made up of the past like this will discover that many shapes and themes soon repeat themselves - in a surprising way. Quite a number of the things that one registers on a first, second and a third glance not only keep returning, but return in ever-new contexts and recombinations, and it is not possible to reduce their sequence to a formula. And it is precisely these, these unpredictable but incessant recurrences, that create the identity of a period of time - a glance at the posters from this year will put us back in-the-world-of-1926.