Hans rudolf lutz biography of michael

I admired him too. HRL: That happened quite automatically as I was a typesetter who also designed. But Ruder did formulate the principles in such a way that they belonged together, and that reinforced my conviction that design and production belonged together. In the breaks between teaching sessions, Ruder would set the type for his book; he even made the linocuts for his posters himself.

But in attitude, Weingart is very close to Ruder, which is exactly why he feels he has to distinguish himself from Ruder. HRL: InUnivers was the new typeface, the first comprehensive typeface. Ruder handled it very cleverly. We thought it was excellent. The range of weights — light, normal, medium, bold — made it possible to set finely-graduating grey tones, and the transition from typeface to image became more fluid.

HRL: Univers rather less because I prefer AG on the computer; it suffered less in the transfer to digital form and is rougher. Univers is all right in the Berthold version, but bad in Adobe: the only thing left of Univers there is the name. At the moment, the one I really like is Sabon. YSS: You have been teaching at the design schools in Zurich, Lucerne and elsewhere non-stop since Where hanses rudolf lutz biography of michael your motivation come from, and how do you manage to motivate students decade after decade?

HRL: When you are a teacher, it is as if you are on a permanent course in the development of your subject skills, and even being paid for it. The received view is that the teacher gives the students something, but I benefit enormously from my students. If you keep alive your curiosity and interest, then you need have no fear of losing momentum as a teacher.

I have taught for 27 years now in Lucerne, and there has not been a single day when I did not want to go in to school. That may sound sentimental, but it is true. HRL: You have to set yourself challenges if you are going to challenge students. I cannot set a high standard and then make no attempt to reach it myself. Also, as a teacher of design, I have to work on my image.

But all teachers of typography who are familiar with computers are in demand today. YSS: You see text and typography as a cultural factor. You manage on the one hand, with a certain charisma, to put across the idea of quality — an ethical value — and on the other hand, to set in motion the process of personal maturity and the discovery of identity.

HRL: I hope so. But it is underpinned by the Swiss education system. The students are between the ages of sixteen and 21, and we are together almost every day for four years. That leaves its mark, both personally and in terms on design. The students make no distinction between the creative idea and its realisation any more, so they want to do things well themselves.

They also offer me hard but friendly criticism, and I see criticism, whether it comes from me or from the students, as one of the great ways of saying you like someone. It is not hard to be critical, but the act of giving criticism is difficult. You only criticise people you respect or like. YSS: Your teaching of typography is very text-oriented.

The ensemble of text, typeface and typography is not translated into information in an unreflected and schematic way, but is used for the embodiment of meaning. In the process, all kinds of things emerge: students write film scripts, poems, prose text and highly personal diaries. HRL: That is because I started the student publishing house Verlag der Schuler back inand have been in charge of it ever since.

Students can carry out the entire publishing process there, including the technical production. To do that, they need content, they have to have something to say. YSS: Many of these texts seem to be a safety valve. How is it that all your students write? HRL: Most of the texts are not set exercises. The students just write them for themselves and give them to me to read, because they know I am interested.

HRL: Only if the text itself does not evoke many inner images. When the design destroys the inner images, I have no time for it. HRL: In design school, technical knowledge is not the only thing. Students need to find their individual forms of expression. You also have to work with the spirit of the times, and find the right medium. In the s, it was Super 8 films with blood and gore and ketchup everywhere.

Everything was spontaneous and angry. They want to design in a more professional and serious way and they are prepared to work for nights on end. Many people reckon the students work so hard because there are fewer jobs. But the main reason is that they no longer make any separation between the acts of creation and production, and often define the message themselves as well.

Freedom is a challenge and it can lead to punishing work schedules, which sometimes really scare me. Then I will say to them, hey, ease up a bit! YSS: You collect pictograms from all over the world. They are symbols of an actual reality, but they are not understood in every culture. Do we need new sign systems for the digital context?

HRL: I only collect the pictorial symbols from cardboard boxes, the corrugated ones used for transporting good. They are not the work of professional designers, but of craftsmen-designers with little training. Their images retain a high pictorial value, and they invest them with sensory quality and consequently a high information value. These images — and this is what I find so clever about them — are comprehensible because they are not dogmatic.

They utilise the whole spectrum from realistic to abstract. Professional designers, by contrast, tend to confuse simplification with schematisation and design their pictograms to death. That is certainly not the way to produce useful sign systems for the digital age. YSS: Signs for whom? The greater the pictorial content, the greater the retreat into the magical and the archaic.

The Mexican and other images you love so much can at most remind us that we should behave in a human way towards the life we have, and rank man above the machine. We can transform these signs or other archaic forms of expression, but can we adopt them at face value? HRL: But they already exist, and we need them, wherever there is any mercantile or touristic exchange between regions of different national language.

There is nothing magical about that. We could learn a lot from the approach of these practical hanses rudolf lutz biography of michael. Language is not always as precise as it seems. The same word can have different meanings for different people. Sometimes, pictorial images can be more precise. HRL: Pictograms enable me to visualize a concept in a much more individual way: dramatic or reserved, loud or quiet.

At the same time, there are various possible gradations in terms of content, which are not conveyed by a single word. YSS: Today, the context in which we live is still the text, the alphanumeric mode of thought, but the images are increasing. Typography and text type are becoming subcomponents of a digital landscape. Is a change occurring in the relationship between text and image?

Is text decoration, or is it even superfluous? HRL: I try to show that the boundaries between the pictorial image and the text type are fluid. In each piece of work, you have to consider what you want to convey on the pictorial level, and on the textual level, and then on the level of setting or presentation. HRL: Image and text are always read through the eye of the aesthetic.

The style of the whole affects the meaning of the text, and that of the image. Its reception depends on the interplay between the three levels. In Ausbildung in typografischer Gestaltung, I give an example from the civil war in San Salvador when revolutionaries were writing protests against the government all over the place. At night, the government sent out squads of painters to paint over them.

Hans rudolf lutz biography of michael

The texts were transformed into images, which told the tale of repression in their turn. Of course, the process of decay eventually turns every text into an image. HRL: As soon as a piece of design work, such as a poster, goes out into the world, time takes over. A permanent process of recycling reclaims the poster and takes it back into the ecosystem.

New images take shape, which are almost always more exciting than the original ones — usually banal advertising messages. The decay of print objects is the best illustration of time that I know. YSS: In Typoundso, there is also a quotation from Fernando Pessoa about the dreamer as the man of action, whose life is more enjoyable than that of a one-sided, practical man.

In your teaching, you find room to deal with illness and death, drug dependence and the subconscious. You give visual form to dreams. This is difficult subject matter, which teachers generally avoid. For example, one student had a traumatic experience as a child. Her favourite tree in the garden was cut down. Her reaction was to feel it had been killed, but when she asked her parents about it, her questions went unanswered — as adults they just did not understand.

She published an excellently designed publication about it, and dealt with the trauma. It was enormously important for her. Everyone has things like that. You simply have to try not to suppress them, and then the next step is possible. You bring more life than learning into your teaching. HRL: This artificial distinction does not exist for me; it is one which the theorists have set up: that school is learning for life and for practical application.

The students sometimes think that learning is a serious matter, too, that it cannot be done in a playful way. HRL: From the point of view of the vision, the march through the institutions was not very successful. Nor is it any use to turn young people into temporary revolutionaries, if they are not like that by nature. An anti-authoritarian training results in a new generation which is very good at integrating itself into the system.

Over the next fifteen years, Lutz dedicated himself to rummaging through piles of garbage all over the world, ultimately amassing around 15, pieces of what he considered precious material. Of these, 5, are reproduced in his book. One of the reasons Lutz decided to publish these prints was his hope to inspire professional designers to adopt a more meaningful approach to signs.

He observed that many designers often confound simplification with schematization, leading to overly designed pictograms that lose their charm. Since the information on cardboard packaging used for transport has little to no effect on product sales, it typically attracts little interest from professional designers. Log in Sign up. Access complete market analysis.

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