A book, a day: Designing Programmes by Karl Gerstner

One of the most important innovators in typography, commercial art and corporate design, Karl Gerstner was a genius. 

A painter and graphic designer alike Ger­st­ner stud­ied design at All­ge­meine Gewerb­schule in Basel under Emil Ruder. He set up his own graphic design studio in 1949, and by 1963 he had part­nered with Markus Kut­ter, a writer and edi­tor, to form the agency Gerstner + Kutter which then became GGK with the addi­tion of archi­tect Paul Gredinger.

Eventually GGK became one of the most successful advertising agencies in Switzerland, with offices in other European countries and the US and his pioneering work – in particular, his designs for Geigy- made him one of the most important exponents of modern commercial graphic design in Switzerland.

His everlasting body of work influenced numerous forms of art. Under his influence typography and graphic design transformed in systematic symmetry.

“He pop­u­lar­ized the use of unjus­ti­fied ragged-right text in typog­ra­phy” writes History of Graphic Design on Gerstner’s very Swiss influence in design.

“He also pro­posed what he called Inte­gral Typog­ra­phy which extended on Max Bill’s typographic ideas. A mes­sage in the form of text can con­vey a mean­ing or some infor­ma­tion, how­ever, when typog­ra­phy is used in an informed man­ner, Ger­st­ner felt that it could greatly con­tribute to the con­nec­tion between the words and the actual mean­ing. Ger­st­ner saw typog­ra­phy as a way to express a whole greater than the sum of words and mean­ings. For exam­ple, the large head­line in one of his Cit­roën adver­tise­ments stated ‘Don’t buy this car’ which was fol­lowed with ‘if you don’t expect some­thing out of the ordi­nary in a car’ in smaller type. While this may seem com­mon­place or trite today, Ger­st­ner + Kut­ter trail­blazed the clever use of type to make a point. In other words, Ger­st­ner knew that the aes­thet­ics of typog­ra­phy can aid the com­mu­ni­ca­tion of ideas and infor­ma­tion and that was the foun­da­tion of Inte­gral Typog­ra­phy.”

His significant role in shaping the postwar graphic design scene is evident in “Designing Programmes” aka one of his most important and influential works ever published.

First published in 1964, and reissued in a new design by Lars Müller Publishers in 2007 “Designing Programmes: Programme as Typeface, Typography, Picture, Method by Karl Gerstner ” provides a basic introduction to his design methodology while suggesting a model for design in the early days of the computer era. G

erstner's innovation was to propose a rule set or system defined by the designer that would determine all aesthetic decisions for a given product: for example, a logo might also function as a layout grid system or inspire a font.

Today the book is especially topical in the context of current developments in computational design. With many examples from the worlds of graphic and product design, music, architecture and art, Designing Programmes inspires the reader to seize on the material, develop it further, and integrate it into his or her own work.

Buy your copy here.