Emil Ruder Craftsman with Words: Richard Hollis

Zip-fastener advertisement, Typographie, Niggli, Teufen 1967.

Zip-fastener advertisement, Typographie, Niggli, Teufen 1967.

More than 50 years ago, I visited Emil Ruder in his home. It was natural to ask him why Swiss typography, which we in England admired, was so advanced. He beckoned me to the window. "Look down there", he said, "a hundred years ago there were cows in the street. We were simple peasants". It wasn't clear what he was implying by this. Emil Ruder was a craftsman: his professional authority was underpinned by craftsmanship. However sophisticated his thinking, he stayed true to the craftsman's ideal of a job perfectly done, with the correct tools and the right materials.

If Ruder was essentially a craftsman, he was in no way tied to the past. Rather the opposite. When he began teaching in 1942, his first stated aim was "to strive for a typography that is an expression of our time". Later, he welcomed such new techniques as phototypesetting: they brought new opportunities. But Ruder's typography was not restricted to the design of "printed matter that modestly serves its purpose", as he defined it. In his hands it could become an expressive medium, especially in posters. Look at the zip-fastener advertisement in his book, Typography, at the Moderne Franzosische Kniipfteppiche poster and at the cover of the Typographische Monatsblätter issue on education in 1964. In these designs the choice and organisation of individual letters perfectly serve to express an idea. But Ruder was essentially a typographer rather than a graphic designer. Letterpress was his medium.

Letterpress, and his support for the new typeface Univers, were the reasons that I visited him. I had become head of a department of graphic design in the west of England, in Bristol. We had a well-equipped letterpress workshop with a first-class trade compositor. Ruder's presentation of Univers in Typographische Monatsblätter made the possibilities of typography seem limitless. To rationalise our department's typefaces it seemed sensible to order Univers in several weights and sizes. This font was to become the standard for all the college's printed matter. Emil Ruder was obviously the person to advise us and, however presumptuously, I invited him to come to Bristol. He accepted.

Here it's necessary to go back to 1957. In that year English designers became aware of Emil Ruder when Graphis magazine published his article "The Typography of Order".[1] This presented an explanation of the kind of typography we had seen in bits and pieces, and more extensively in the Zurich-based quarterly Neue Grafik. These ideas from Switzerland opened a new world to young designers in England, where typography was mostly one of disorder and of eclectic traditions. Designers were looking for some discipline, and a way of working that matched contemporary technology. Although Neue Grafik provided plenty of examples of what was called "constructive" graphics, what was lacking, and what Ruder provided, was the kind of critical appreciation of how this "new graphic design" met aesthetic and practical demands. By dividing the elements of typography into "Interrelation of function and form", "Unprinted spaces", '"Overall' design (Durchgestaltung)", "Grid", "Written and printed texts", "Typography in pictorial work", Ruder revealed the essentials of his teaching at Basel. To these he added "Plane", "Line", "Word" and "Rhythm" in articles in TM, a series entitled "Fundamentals" (Wesentliches), illustrated so clearly with diagrams, photographs and paintings that the reader feels as if present at a lecture. Here was a philosophy of typography. Extended, and with many examples reworked from these articles and from his professional practice, Ruder's systematic view of his craft became the book Typography, published in 1967.[2]

Typography is a compendium of Ruder's teaching. His qualities as a teacher have been warmly recorded by his students and in the tributes edited by Helmut Schmid in The Road to Basel[3] and the special issue of the Japanese journal IDEA.[4] To many he was much more than a teacher of typography; to some he was a father figure, remembered by Yves Zimmermann as "the model of an authentic personality". The adjectives used by the former students say everything, that he was: understanding, sensitive, helpful, pioneering, uncompromising, clear, enlightening, convincing. As to Ruder coming to teach at Bristol, he had written to me that his health made this impossible. Nonetheless, there are examples of work done at the school that clearly show his influence. In this way aspects of the Basel AGS surfaced in 1960s Bristol.

We perhaps need no reminding of Basel's special place in the history of printing and graphic design. In the twentieth century, aside from the so-called Basel school of poster artists – Burkhard Mangold, Niklaus Stoecklin, Peter Birkhauser, Fritz Buhler, Herbert Leupin – Basel enjoys a special status in the development of Modernism. A leading part was played by the art historian Georg Schmidt.[5] First at the Gewerbemuseum and then as director at the Kunstmuseum, Schmidt gave determined support to progressive ideas. For example, he advocated standardised paper sizes at a time when they were yet to be adopted in Switzerland. Without his enthusiasm, exhibitions – several concerned with printing such as "Ausstellung neue Typographie" in 1927, or that on the Bauhaus in 1929, "Neue Werbegraphik" in 1930, would have been unlikely. In the Werkbund journal, Das Werk, Schmidt wrote on such topics as shop window display and the photographic poster. The quality of catalogues and posters for both museums established a tradition. Ruder and his colleagues at the school – in particular, Armin Hofmann – were to extend this tradition.

Much of the Gewerbemuseum's printed matter was designed by Jan Tschichold, who had recently arrived from Germany, teaching a short course at the AGS and working for a Basel publisher. His book Typographische Gestaltung, published in Basel in 1935, connected tradition to the New Typography which he had pioneered in the 1920s. Also on the school staff were the supremely versatile designer Hermann Eidenbenz and Theo Ballmer, returned from a year at the Bauhaus, teaching photography.

Two significant factors helped the development of modernist graphic design in Basel. One was the Mustermesse, which had enhanced the city's standing as an international trade centre; the other was the city's pharmaceutical industry. Indeed, packaging and promotion for the chemical firm Geigy was one of the first expressions of "Swiss style”.[6] Geigy had its own advertising department, which was staffed mainly by former students from the AGS.

Some former students who worked for Geigy, such as Nelly Rudin and Fridolin Muller, took their expertise and experience to Zurich. There was mutual admiration between the graphic designers and typographers in Basel and Zurich. Both Ruder and his colleague Armin Hofmann had studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich. Karl Gerstner, another from the AGS with Geigy experience, had early allegiances in Zurich as an active Werkbund member. When he edited and designed a special graphic design issue of Werk in 1955, of nearly 50 works reproduced, 15 were by designers from Basel, 17 from Zurich. By the time the Verband Schweizerischer Grafiker published an illustrated directory of members in 1960, there were more than five times as many contributors from Zurich as from Basel.

If there is a simple distinction between graphic design in Zurich and Basel in the late twentieth century, it is that Zurich was dominated by the "constructive" designers, those who eliminated drawn illustration and emphasised an aesthetic not unlike engineering, organised on a grid. Basel design, equally disciplined in graphic technique, is best described as less formal.

Designers and design schools in other countries took their view of "Swiss style" mainly from the Zurich-based magazine Neue Grafik which first appeared in 1958. The same year Graphis had published an article on Armin Hofmann's teaching, and an article two years earlier on "Geigy style". But when Josef Muller-Brockmann proposed that Ruder and Armin Hofmann should be on the Neue Grafik editorial board, his colleagues rejected them. Richard Paul Lohse and Carlo Vivarelli, both Concrete artists, may have seen the Basel teachers as lacking in constructivist rigour. But the Basel designers could hardly be ignored. Ruder's "Murano Glass" poster appeared in the first issue; in the second, Gerard lfert, a former AGS student, in a substantial article on "Graphic designers of the new generation", reproduced work by several Basel designers, as well as Gerstner, Rudin, and Fridolin Muller, much of it for Geigy. Neue Grafik later included Ruder in the topic "The Control of Blank Space", illustrating his design for the book on Le Corbusier's chapel at Ronchamp, bizarrely captioned "Prospectus for a book on sculpture".[7]

What Ruder shared with Neue Grafik was a concern for history. Neue Grafik used history to justify its own limited aesthetic. Ruder used history, not only of typography but also of art, for the lessons it provided. Karl Gerstner mentions Ruder producing a box containing specimens of treasured printed work designed by Dadaists, Futurists, examples from the Bauhaus and the early avant-garde, such as Piet Zwart, and from Tschichold, who had left his collection to the school library. Such lessons bore fruit in Gerstner and Markus Kutter's book, Die neue Graphik in 1959 and Fridolin Muller's book on the work of Piet Zwart in 1966.[8]

In 1960 the Basel Gewerbemuseum held an exhibition with the simple title "Typography" . The poster was designed by Ruder's colleague Robert Buchler, the catalogue was produced by Ruder himself. With more than 100 illustrations of the period from the nineteenth century to the present and extensive quotations from the avant-garde, the 100-page booklet ends with Ruder's and Armin Hofmann's essays from the special "Integral Typography" issue of TM in 1959. Here Ruder shows the strength of his belief in progress. He attacks Tschichold's return to centred layouts, and puts forth the typesetter's point of view: that asymmetrical setting (Flattersatz) is simplest, whereas centering lines of type demands more work. "Actual writing forms the basis of printed lettering and thus also of typography" . And writing implied a movement towards the right: letterforms with this tendency preclude a symmetrical arrangement of lines since the centre of the column is hard to identify. Regarding a contemporary style, Ruder asserts that style "cannot be created, it emerges, often unconsciously."

Ruder's style shares characteristics with many of his colleagues. The setting of type aligned both to the left and right of a vertical axis, the placing of elements, large and small, close to the edge of the sheet (the cover to "lntegrale Typographie" and others for TM, posters for "die gute Form", "Japanische Kalligraphie", "Beckmann"); his almost exaggerated use of white space, not only within the design as a whole, but between words or phrases. More important was the meaning of the words and the syntax of phrases or sentences. The sense of the words determined the way they were spaced. The most obviously stressed element in his typography is the use of the square, almost a symbol of the orthogonal nature of metal typesetting.

The advent of Univers added a new dimension to Ruder's work. The variety of letterforms, their variety of weights and widths, the very marked slope of the italic, gave new possibilities for an expressive typography, which he and his former student Bruno Pfaffli, demonstrated in TM. The elegance and intelligence of Pfaffli's designs prompted me, since I was also working in Paris, to visit him at Adrian Frutiger's studio there. The only secret of such typography was an understanding of the type material that was available to articulate the message.

When French visitors came to see Ruder in 1962, he told them that "In this school I wanted typography to reach a level of artistic expression equal to that of graphic design.”[9] But writing about Ruder's book Typography in 1967, Wolfgang Weingart says that Ruder "marks the end of creative typography, especially in metal typesetting.”[10] Perhaps Ruder's work took typography in metal to the limit of its expressive possibilities.

Although he used metal rules (Linien) only rarely to make the typographic structure – common in so-called "Bauhaus" print style – Ruder's typography, however inventive, was marked by predictable devices. For example, the setting of a single line whose length became the basis for the organisation of the printed sheet, the placing of text close to the margin, extending the sheet to the width of the sheet, the obvious deployment of the square both as a basis for the placing of graphic elements and for the proportion of images. By contrast, Weingart's work, and that of many others, no longer in letterpress, had a freedom possible with photosetting and photographic techniques. This fitted with Ruder's understanding that typography would change to assimilate technological innovations. As Ruder wrote in 1967, many years before the computer transformed and accelerated all graphic processes, "The forward-looking professional has no cause for alarm about the typography of the coming decades, and he knows about the many untapped possibilities which ensure an unconventional style of design in tune with the times."[11]

This is why Emil Ruder was such an attractive figure to young designers in 1960. Those who met him for the first time were, like Adrian Frutiger, "rather proud and a little intimidated." Ruder and his wife gave him a good lunch, followed by a study of some books, old and new, posters and drawings and a discussion of the forms of written text. Their meeting ended with Ruder playing the violin. Frutiger took this "as an example: of life could be lived as a whole, working, teaching, eating, home life and love, united in a striving for the aesthetically satisfying." The man and the work were inseparable.

Ruder could have counted himself as one of the "forward-looking professionals". Firmly rooted in a historical trade, he not only used type and letterpress in a contemporary manner, but could transmit his dedication and knowledge in his teaching, his writing and in the example of his own craftsmanship. And generations of typographers will bear in mind Ruder's dictum: "The proper purpose of typography is communication."

Notes

1   Graphis, November 1957, pp. 404-413

2   Typographie: Teufen, Niggli, 1967

3   Schmidt, Helmut (ed.). The Road to Basel/ Der Weg nach Basel. Tokyo: Robundo, 1997

4   Ruder Typography: Ruder Philosophy, IDEA vol. 57/2, no. 333, Tokyo: 2009

5   Georg Schmidt's brother, the architect Hans Schmidt, was a member of the constructivist ABC group that included the Russian, El Lissitzky and the Dutch architect, Mart Stam. Both Lissitzky and Stam made contributions to the canon of graphic design history. Also a member of ABC was the Basel architect Hannes Meyer, who succeeded Gropius as director of the Bauhaus from 1928 to 1930.

6   At the Mustermesse in 1936 the Grata International exhibition was attended by several representatives of the avant-garde: Herbert Bayer, Karel Teige, Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart, and Piel Zwart.

7   Hans Neuburg, "Die Beherrschung des freien Raumes in der graphischen Gestaltung", Neue Grafik, no.3, October 1959, p.56

8   Gerstner, Karl and Markus Kutter, Die neue Graphik, Teufen: Niggli, 1959 and Muller, Fridolin, (ed.), Piet Zwart, Teufen: Niggli, 1966

9   Typographische Monatsblätter, no.8/9, 1962, p.554

10   Weingart, Wolfgang, "Skizzen zu Emil Ruders Druckwerk uber Typographie", pp.286-287.Typographische Monatsblätter, no.4, 1967

11   "20 Jahre Buchdruckfachklasse Basel", Typographische Monatsblätter, no.10, 1967, reprinted as "Typography as Communication and Form", Typography Today, IDEA special issue, Tokyo, 1980, p.49

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