Lit review

Okay a small lit review just to remind myself of what i learnt from reading a number of books before i think about conducting a small survey or email various companies for ideas.

# Author Richard Hollis

# Hardcover: 272 pages

# Publisher: Yale University Press (April 28, 2006)

Review:

Hollis's book, while extensive in its documentation and admirable in its visual organization of the Swiss developments, comes to several conclusions which should be questioned. The first is the disproportionate and misguided prominence afforded Theo Ballmer as a prime influence stemming from his experience at the Bauhaus. Whatever Ballmer's influence as a poster designer in the 20s was, he had gotten his essential training in the Basel school, which underwent its own ongoing and largely independent modernist development, prior to Ballmer's very brief time at the Bauhaus. The Bauhaus influence is deemed minor by the emerging Basel school, and Ballmer's later influence in teaching photography and lettering has to be considered a lesser one.

Significant also is the confusion in reporting influences in development of the cutting edge Geigy Pharmaceuticals graphics program where the influences of Armin Hofmann and Emil Ruder as educators of the leading Geigy designers are missing. While this is inferred on page 162 in the statement that "the Geigy style originated in the teaching at the Allgemeine Gewerbeschule," the key influences in Basel--Hofmann and Ruder--are not mentioned.

Similarly, Hollis attributes Müller-Brockman's "conversion" to the influences of Lohse and Vivarelli, the evidence being the concert hall posters of 1951 and 52. While this is definitely a move in that direction from an earlier illustrative style, the most convincing change, and the style by which Müller-Brockman is widely known, emerged on the hiring of graduates of the Basel school under Armin Hofmann in 1955. This means that Hofmann and Ruder pre-date Müller-Brockman's mature style instead of being placed as p. 214 as a separate and later development--and not as a precursor feeding the larger Swiss development from a more humanistic perspective than the more constructivist direction of the Zürich school. One can argue about which contributed most to the international prominence of Swiss design, but Hollis's own statement p. 215 regarding the world-wide significance of Hofmann's Graphic Design Manual, Principles and Practice, on education is telling. Müller-Brockman's more objective approach was probably more influential in the world of corporate graphics.

Hollis betrays a bias, perhaps, in his strange analysis of Hofmann's Tell poster and omits such key poster achievements as the "Switzerland in the Roman Era" (1957). It is unfortunate that Hollis did not interview Armin and Dorothea Hofmann. They are few of the remaining key figures from the era of Hollis's investigation.