Introduction to Swiss Design

Swiss design is a form of graphic design using mainly typography (usually sans-serif (Helvetica)) and the structure given by a grid system. The style started sometime in the 1950’s and was moulded from newer, modern-looking art forms, including those found in World War 2 poster designs. The grid system provides a layout for a piece of graphic design and tends to be used to split a page into 4 columns. This is useful as it provides a simple layout that guides the reader’s eye to the areas you want it to and makes it easier to read magazine articles.

One of the main pioneers of Swiss Design is Josef Müller-Brockmann, who helped develop the font Helvetica as well as making many Swiss Design pieces. Since before his time a lot of art still resembled old-fashioned medieval art, Josef wanted to make a new, more modern-looking design principle. So, he developed Swiss Design, which inspired many modern art pieces and has found use in many ways such as in magazines, newspaper articles and even movie posters.

My Work

In this project we were asked to use Swiss Design to make a poster for the C27 room that we use for graphic design. We had to include the letters and numbers in C27 as well as adding rules and features of the room. I decided to use the primary colours for the C27 in the centre as well as then adding rules interspersed on the outside of the C27 as well as inside.

Artist Poster Design

Poster Work Reflection

I was trying to communicate that it’s rap music through colours, layout and general design, as well as fonts. I used grids to align mainly the typography as well as using simplicity to make it easy for the eye to see. I chose sans serif fonts that were simple yet effective as well as combining colours and text to make simple but effective font colours and styles. I used shapes and layout to guide the eye to different elements of the poster. The simplicity combined with the layout makes it simple to understand and gives you an insight into the music and artist. I think I made it too simple and I need to make it a bit more visually interesting.