Stylogenyin the style of Swiss Punk / New Wave Typography

Postmodern · 1968–1990 · Central Europe, North America

Swiss Punk / New Wave Typography

Also known as New Wave, Swiss Punk, Basel New Wave

A rebellion from inside the Swiss school: Wolfgang Weingart and his Basel students kept the grotesque and the grid but set them in motion with extreme letterspacing, stepped and angled lines, rules and bars, enlarged halftone screens and layered film montage. Carried to the US by April Greiman, Dan Friedman and others, it became an intuitive, textured counterpoint to corporate modernism and a bridge to digital postmodern typography.

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A sample layout drawn from the style’s design choices, until its AI image is made.

01

How it works

  • Start from a Swiss grid and grotesque, then violate the grid with stepped, angled and floating lines.
  • Vary letterspacing to extremes: open one word across the page, then crowd the next line.
  • Use rules, bars, dots and stepped lines as structural, rhythmic elements.
  • Layer film positives, halftone screens and type into a translucent, spatial montage.
  • Mix weights and sizes within a single text block to give it texture, not just hierarchy.

Basel (Allgemeine Gewerbeschule), then Los Angeles and New York

02

Its design choices

From Stylogeny’s vocabulary of design choices: defining choices make the style, characteristic ones are usual, occasional ones turn up now and then.

Layout & composition
Space & hierarchy
Typography
Colour
Form & shape
Surface & texture
Ornament
Imagery
Medium & production
Tone & intent
Avoids
Central symmetry, Classical text block, Floral & vegetal, Abundant decoration, Script, Painterly illustration, Skeuomorphic material, Nostalgic & retro

Palette

  • #f4f1ea
  • #111111
  • #e6007e
  • #0098d8
  • #f7d117
  • #9fd8cb

Typefaces

  • Akzidenz-Grotesk

  • Univers

  • Helvetica

Known for

  • Wolfgang Weingart

    Kunsthalle Basel posters; Typografische Monatsblätter covers

  • April Greiman

    Wet magazine; Design Quarterly #133, 1986

  • Dan Friedman

  • Willi Kunz

  • Rosmarie Tissi & Siegfried Odermatt

  • Allgemeine Gewerbeschule Basel

    Weiterbildungsklasse für Grafik

03

Make something in this style

Say what you need, and Stylogeny’s image studio draws it from Swiss Punk / New Wave Typography’s design choices and checks it against them. It takes about a minute, and you get a link to share.

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04

Where it comes from, and what it’s close to

Before it

The style it grew out of, and the styles it borrowed from.

This styleSwiss Punk / New Wave Typography1968–1990 · Central Europe, North America

After it

The styles that grew out of it.

Alike in its design choices

Styles that make many of the same choices, related or not, besides those above.

05

Real works

Artefacts in museums, libraries and archives that show the style, linked at their source.

06

Sources

  1. Philip B. Meggs & Alston W. Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design
  2. Wolfgang Weingart, My Way to Typography (Lars Müller, 2000)
  3. Steven Heller, 'Wolfgang Weingart, Typographic Disruptor and Pioneer', Print

How Stylogeny researches and checks a style: where the facts come from.