A tribute to my design teachers

A few weeks ago graphic designer, typographer and educator Wolfgang Weingart passed away. I think we can all agree that he left a lasting legacy amongst a whole generation of designers, and beyond. In his death he was preceded some months earlier by André Gürtler and Armin Hoffman who both also made deep impressions upon hundreds of Basel School of Design graduates.

Seeing Armin Hoffman’s work retrospective last year — online only due to the pandemic — and more recently an interview with Weingart at the Gewerbemuseum Zürich via YouTube made me reflect on my design education in Basel from 1984 to 1988, and how much my teachers in Basel had affected my career and work. Looking back, I now have the maturity to understand that although each of my teachers taught their own respective subject they all followed a single educational strategy and philosophy of design: Observe, Analyze, Create.

This philosophy was probably best embodied in Kurt Hauert’s class that asked us to create graphic translations of everyday and often mundane objects, and find their essence. Take a humble wine glass for instance: there are myriad ways to draw it with black and white gouache — or with some fancy digital equipment today — but to extract its essence is something altogether different. I discovered the meaning of that essence after sketching the glass over 250 times. This process forced me to truly observe and analyze the wine glass, and in turn observe and analyze the creation on paper.

Finding the essence is a process of capturing light, reflections, shadows and one’s own interpretation of what one sees through slowly moulding and shaping the drawing.

The educational goal was not to draw the perfect wine glass but to have skills honed enough to, in the future, enable me to find the essence of any object with only few sketches.

Spacing exercises help to train the eye to be able to see the most minute details

The same process applied to Weingart’s classes. Everyone, irrespective of their background and experience, had to start with the most basic of exercises: correctly spacing a word set in all caps, Univers 55 at 72 point. Only once you mastered this exercise could you proceed to the next stage. This is a humble exercise but it forces the practitioner to observe, analyze and create — and to continually question their actions. Ultimately, the skills gained through a strict progression of such exercises allowed us to create compositions that are more to do with Kurt Schwitters Dada pieces than applied typographic communication. I could cite more examples how this design and educational philosophy was carried through all courses but I believe you understand the principle.

A study in composition following the fictional brief to design a poster for tourism in Rome.

Embedded into these three values of ‘observe, analyze and create’ is the notion that you need to think critically, that you need to continuously question your own motives for coming to a certain conclusion, and that you need to continuously question the desires and motives of your client. When presenting your work to the world, you need to have clear rationales as to why things are the way they are. That requires observation and analysis. Saying ‘I like it’ simply does not do. It was more than once in Weingart’s class that he asked me: “So what are you doing in my class? You really should be a gardener”, and it was only later in my time at Basel that I understood what he meant by this.

It was in André Gürtler’s class that I discovered my love for typeface design which subsequently I have pursued for more than 30 years. His class, too, followed the above mentioned principles and, looking back, they were enforced again when I joined the Monotype Drawing Office in 1989 as a fresh graduate. A series of strict exercises, devised by David Saunders, to train hand-eye coordination and the use of drawing tools further prepared me to design type digitally with bezier curves to a high and professional quality.

The letters illustrated here were drawn using gouache paint only, and were not pre-sketched with pencil. This process allows for organically shaping the letters as one would do with a clay sculpture.

Today, I am increasingly directing my skills and experience toward accessibility in type and typography, and the philosophy that my teachers at Basel taught me is fundamental to understanding what that means. ‘I like it’ simply doesn’t do when it comes to accessibility. In the article ‘The three pillars of accessibility’ I define what you need to think about when you create, and the above mentioned design philosophy describes how you need to think about your design work. Design is not about self-fulfilment and chasing the next award; design is about finding solutions to a problem that benefits as broad a group of people as possible.

All images copyright of Bruno Maag