Communication Design Studio II: Connecting History: Biography of Josef Müller-Brockmann
Updated February 29th, 2016
Josef Müller-Brockmann, born in 1914 in Rapperswil, Switzerland, was a designer who found calmness and serenity in great reductive and constructivist design. As someone with several muses including theatre, music, mathematics, logic, illustration, teaching, and structure, Brockmann used these necessities of his life to boil down his work to its simplest form, creating beauty through unburdening his work of the unnecessary.
Müller-Brockmann’s love of structure possibly steamed from several important facets of his life. As early as in middle school, Müller-Brockmann was showing signs of extreme intelligence. Not only was he studious and responsible, but his teachers noticed extreme talent in the areas of geometry and drawing. However, because Müller-Brockmann was one of eight children being raised by a widowed mother, there was simply not enough money for all the children to be educated. Though Müller-Brockmann longed to continue his education, he decided to leave school at the age of sixteen so he could begin working in an illustration-based trade. When asked about this time in his life, Müller-Brockmann recalls that the path to becoming a designer was always meant to be “winding.”
Despite leaving education at an early age, Müller-Brockmann’s tenacity for learning and art did not falter at all, and on the contrary, grew as he continued to age. After leaving school, Müller-Brockmann began working for Alex Walter Diggelmann, who, only 29 at the time, owned a small studio that had impressive clientele in Zürich. During his time at this apprenticeship, Müller-Brockmann learned much about typography and graphics. A key principle of Müller-Brockmann’s that developed at this time was his appreciation for determining the quality of letterforms based on the needs, subject, and period of the pieces. Heavily inspired by Paul Renner, Müller-Brockmann discovered his talent for creating work that was both minimalistic and free of ornamentation, yet, extremely clear and understandable.
In the early 1930s, as Germany became under the rule of Nazis and Switzerland felt the turbulent effects of the switch of power, Müller-Brockmann seeked solace in the prospect of learning more about his developing passions of art and design. Knowing that his family did not have the resources to pay for his education, he decided to show up at the classroom of Ernst Keller, a famous designer recognized for his knowledge in typography, book production, and poster design. Upon arrival, Müller-Brockmann asked to be registered as a student at the school Keller was teaching at, the Kunstgewerbeschule (the Zürich School of Arts and Crafts).
Though Müller-Brockmann had not completed any of the formal application to be considered for acceptance into the Kunstgewerbeschule, his yearn to be taught led him to show up at Keller’s class everyday and stand in the doorway until Keller allowed him to audit the class. Since Müller-Brockmann had no way of paying for these classes, Keller arranged a deal that he could stay in the class if, in return, he would help prepare classrooms. Once a student at Kunstgewerbeschule, Müller-Brockmann found that along with Ernst Keller, he had acquired another mentor, Alfred Willimann, a famous designer and photographer.
Through Keller and Willimann, Müller-Brockmann not only learned a great deal about design and photography, but also began developing a design style of his own. An exercise of Keller’s that helped shape Müller-Brockmann drive to create designs of essence instead of extravagance was to encourage his students to take their work and reduce it to its simplest state. Using this exercise, Müller-Brockmann learned the importance of using color, type, and form to convey messages, and to have evidence and reason behind even the smallest of details in his work. From Willimann, Müller-Brockmann honed his eye for photography, and began to see photographs as graphic objects, which could be edited and manipulated in innovative ways as well as the importance of process in any type of work. Müller-Brockmann began to see that the design process could be just as crucial as the final product, if not more so.
A central part of Müller-Brockmann’s philosophy was his yearn for transparency and ease in relation to his design work and other works of art such as theatre and gallery curation. Because of this yearn, Müller-Brockmann searched for elements of design that he found clear-cut and important and used them for much of his life. This includes his love for geometric grids as well as his patterns with typefaces. Before 1952, Müller-Brockmann favored a semibold grotesque font. After this, he almost exclusively used Akzidenz-Grotesk because of its beautiful detail.
In 1958, along with several colleagues and friends, Josef Müller-Brockmann initiated the creation of a new design magazine, Neue Grafik (New Graphic Design). When asked about how the magazine was founded, Müller-Brockmann explained, “I had the idea in 1955 of founding a periodical for rational and constructive graphic design to counter the excessively irrational, pseudo-artistic advertising I saw around me.” With or without realizing it, Müller-Brockmann and his colleagues created one of the most influential tools to further the idea of Swiss graphic design, also known as the “international style.” The collection of the total of 18 issues of Neue Grafik is to this day considered one of the most important texts on the foundations of current communication and constructive design.
When interviewed in 1960 about his work and opinions of design, Josef Müller-Brockmann exposed some of his inner thinkings and his feelings about his pieces. When asked what he regarded as his best work, he replied, “The white reverse sides of my posters!” Showing his sense of humor, this answer also again confirms Müller-Brockmann’s love for only the bare necessity within design. Due to this love of simplicity, Müller-Brockmann confirmed in the same interview that he prefers photography to illustration in his work because, in his words, “photography is a credible reflection of reality that enables me to make an objective statement. Emotion in images, as in painted realisations of ideas and visions, can produce genuine works of art, but in advertising I value as much objectivity as possible.”
Perhaps due to his attraction to simplicity and ease, Josef Müller-Brockmann, unlike many other designers of his time, never left Switzerland for extended amounts of time to work abroad. Due to his compassion for the Swiss “die gute form”, or good design/good form movement, Müller-Brockmann advanced this cause by involving himself in local work, such as creating posters and advertisement material for the Zurich Tonhalle, and later teaching at the university he once took classes at.
Josef Müller-Brockmann’s love and appreciation for art is seen in many of his choices in his work, but also in his personal life. Müller-Brockmann’s first wife, Verena Brockmann (who he assumed the second last name Brockmann from), was a famous violinist. With her, he had a son Andreas, After her passing, Müller-Brockmann married a Japanese artist, Shizuko Yoshikawa. Throughout his life, Müller-Brockmann surrounded himself around people involved in all facets of art and culture including music, theatre, design, as well as others. It seems as though the discipline found in his work was an allude to changing styles and fads throughout time, and with this discipline, his love for the arts was able to be rekindled as decades determined what art was created. When speaking about this, Müller-Brockmann stated, “tomorrow or in ten or twenty years’ time aesthetic tastes will have changed, but laws last and are independent of time.”
Though Müller-Brockmann kept his personal life private, he is described as others as kind, brilliant, meticulous, and incredible. His work along with his contributions through magazine and several books helped shape a nation’s style of graphic design, and has still been regarded as one of the most important directions in design history. As Müller-Brockmann said himself, “no great work is created without material rules, without knowing about stress ratios or the laws of perception.” It was with great discipline and desire that Müller-Brockmann rose to prominence in the design world, and without his contributions, Swiss design, as well as global design, would lack the same connective architecture that allows creativity to remain relevant throughout time.
Bibliography
Websites
“Joseph Müller-Brockmann : Design Is History.” Joseph Müller-Brockmann : Design Is History. N.p., n.d. Web.
Schneider, Speider. “Osef Müller-Brockmann: Principal Of The Swiss School.” Noupe. Noupe, 20 Sept. 2011.
Schwemer-Scheddin, Yvonne. “Reputations: Josef Müller-Brockmann.” Eye Magazine. N.p., n.d. Web.
Müller-Brockmann, Josef, and Lars Müller. Josef Müller-Brockmann: Pioneer of Swiss Graphic Design. Baden, Switzerland: Lars Müller, 2000. Print.
Müller-Brockmann, Josef. Grid Systems in Graphic Design: A Visual Communication Manual for Graphic Designers, Typographers, and Three Dimensional Designers = Raster Systeme Für Die Visuelle Gestaltung: Ein Handbuch Für Grafiker, Typografen, Und Ausstellungsgestalter. Niederteufen: Verlag Arthur Niggli, 1981. Print.
Purcell, Kerry William, and Josef Müller-Brockmann. Josef Müller-Brockmann. New York: Phaidon, 2006. Print.
