Swiss Style

As part of my essay research I am looking at various areas. Currently I'm looking into how typography reflects mindsets, mood, mentality or culture.

In one of our lectures we covered the Swiss style, also known as the International Typographic Style, which is as neutral as the country itself (e.g. it stays out of wars). This style is very modern, elegant and has a cleaniliness about it which makes it neutral but suitable for almost anything. It focuses on the objective of legibility and objectivity, and has reformed the style of typography since the 1950's. And of course, since this was such a revolutionary change to typography, something great came of it: Helvetica. The only typeface to reach celebrity status, be featured everywhere and even have a film made about it. Let alone the amount of books written on it.

 

What I am really interested in about this style though is how typefaces represent and stand for something, i.e. represent a mentality. The Swiss have their neutral type, and the Germans went from the old, very hard and headstrong typeface (like Fraktur or Antiqua) through the modernist Bauhaus movement to much more simple and clean typefaces like DIN, the common roadsign font. Its very strong and precise, quite like the general german mentality. In the cases of Germany and Switzerland I see a similarity between type and mentality, so I will keep looking into this.

However I am also fascinated by type cognition and ligibility, so I shall be researching and posting on both areas.