Max Bill studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich from 1924 until 1927. He visited Paris in 1925 and was inspired by the work of Le Corbusier, Josef Hoffmann and Friedrich Kiesler. After attending a lecture by Le Corbusier in Zurich he decided to study architecture. He studied at the Bauhaus in Dessau, from 1927 until 1929. Then moved to Zurich and worked in typography, graphic design, painting, sculpture and architecture. He was also a teacher at  Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich, a guest lecturer at the Technische Hochschule in Darmstadt and worked at  Hochschule für Gestaltung, Ulm.

Max Bill

Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.
But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.

TV Series Ways of Seeing

Ways of Seeing

Otl Aicher's writings are explorations of the world, a substantive part of his work. In moving through the history of thought and design, building and construction, he assures us of the possibilities of arranging existence in a humane fashion. As ever he is concerned with the question of the conditions needed to produce a civilized culture. These conditions have to be fought for against apparent factual or material constraints and spiritual and intellectual substitutes on offer.


The World As Design

The Foundation Program at the School of Design in Basel, Swit zerland is a fundamental education in art and design. It offers a number of interrelated, equally important courses. Subjects include exercises in form, aesthetics, and concepts, all of which are designed to promote optical and tactical sensitivity, formal perception, manual dexterity, and a clear understanding of creative processes and to clarity the students individual talents. The program enables them to choose future professional training in graphic design, photography, typography, display design, goldsmithery, pottery, fine art, sculpture, and other related fields.

Basic Principles of Design

A collection of 40 essays about art, design and visual communications by leading design critic Rick Poynor.

Why Graphic Culture Matters

Laszlo Moholy-Nagyb was a major innovator of the avant-garde and one of the most important theoreticians of the 1920s.

Vision in Motion

Complete review of Herbert Bayer works from visual communications, to architecture and painting.

visual communication architecture painting

Although typography has always reflected the cultural pattern of its period, today's typefaces and typographic design are a reflection of the past, not of contemporary society.

De Buitenkant

Wim Crouwel Gerrit Noordzij prize

The Kiyosato Museum of Contemporary Art was a private museum that opened in Kiyosato, Yamanashi Prefecture in 1990 and closed in 2014.

This book, focusing exclusively on the museum’s “Ephemera” collection, is the first volume of a project to assemble the materials of the Kiyosato Museum of Contemporary Art, which have never been compiled until now, and to publish archival books.

Edition Telescope

Kiyosato Museum of Contemporary Art: Archive 1 Ephemera

Paying tribute to an artistic partnership of more than 30 years, this richly illustrated book explores Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s acclaimed and influential body of work, known for its sly humor and profound meditations on the everyday. 

The Way Things Go

Peter Fischli David Weiss: How to Work Better

Since the 1970s Wolfgang Weingart has exerted a decisive influence on the international development of typography. In the late 1960s he instilled creativity and a desire for experimentation into the ossified Swiss typographical industry and reflected this renewal in his own work. 

His works at MoMA

My Way to Typography

Comprehensive collection of work of Paul Rand (1914-1996), the Picasso of Graphic Design. A pioneer in the field of visual communication, Rand developed a fresh and individual design language drawn from European art movements including Russian constructivism, de Stijl, and the Bauhaus. His career as an art director, teacher, writer, and design consultant to major corporations spanned almost seven decades.

A Designer's Art gives unique insight into Rand's design process and theory.

Paul Rand

A Designer's Art

She devoted her life to her craft and photographed continuously and passionately for over 70 years. Her images of the body explore the human form in great detail: eyes, ears, heads, hands, breasts, feet.

Imogen Cunningham: On the Body

Imogen Cunningham: Flora presents a stunning selection of Cunningham's botanical images dating from 1913 through the 1970s, with an emphasis on work from the 1920s and 1930s. More than half the images have never been published. 

Imogen Cunningham

Imogen Cunningham: Flora

"Ambitious modernists, like Weston and Cartier-Bresson, who understand photography as a genuinely new way of seeing (precise, intelligent, even scientific), have been challenged by photographers of a later generation, like  Robert Frank, who want a camera eye that is not piercing but democratic, who don't claim to be setting new standards for seeing."

On Photography

Brought to you by GraphicDesign&,
Page 1: Great Expectations is an unusual
typographic experiment designed to
explore the relationship between graphic
design, typography and the reading of
a printed page.

GraphicDesign&

Page 1: Great Expectations

"Once we start look at life in this creative way, we become far freer and more fluid, in our quest for inspiring relations with our environment. This is, in fact, what artists do. They do not utilise their objects, but initiate a conversation with the environment. Listening to what it has to offer, as well as offering something of themselves to the environment, which it still lacks. This is how the art grows. 

The principle has more common with dialogue and communication that with monologue and utilisation"

Valiz

Creative Theories of (Just About) Everything

Maybe this is the happiest house on earth.

The Private World of Pablo Picasso

When the eyes and years are prevented from perceiving meaningful order, they can only react to the brutal signals of immediate satisfaction

Film as Art

Copywriting

"I don't feel comfortable talking about pleasure; I find it easier to talk about desire. Since I started composing perfumes I've learned, I've invented 'catchphrase-smells', like the first sentence, the first notes of a piece of music, the initial images that are reworked at length to capture a reader's, a listener's, a spectator's attention."

Book cover design by Pentagram

The Diary of a Nose

Art and Visual Perception

The mind's eye. Writings on Photography and Photographers

"Studio Culture (original edition of 2009) provides a unique glimpse into the inner workings of 28 leading graphic design studios. In a series of penetrating interviews, the secret life of the studio is revealed, and the mechanics of building and maintaining a vibrant studio culture are laid bare with disarming frankness."

Unit Editions

Typeface Optimo Hermes

Post Poetics bookstore

Studio Culture: The secret life of the graphic design studio

Interviews and Conversations 1951-1998

In Praise of Shadows

Atmospheres

"The world is blue at its edges and in its depths.
This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water."

Alice's Book Shelf