Typography: Formation and Transformation

by Willi Kunz
Verlag Niggli, Zurich, Switzerland, 2003
160 pp., illus. Trade, $59.00
ISBN 3-7212-0495-6.
Available in the U.S. from Willi Kunz Books, P.O. Box 282, Planetarium Station, New York NY 10024-0282.

Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens
Department of Art
University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA 50614, USA

ballast@netins.net

The author of this book about "typographic process" is a prominent Swiss-born designer who has lived and worked in the U.S. for more than three decades. Educated at the Zurich Kunstgewerbeschule in Switzerland, he moved to New York in 1970, where he established his own design firm. He has also taught typography at the Basel School of Design (as a leave replacement for Wolfgang Weingart) and at Ohio State University. Until about six years ago, he was almost exclusively known among designers for the experimental work he did in the late 1970s, in particular, his typographic interpretations of the ideas of Marshall McLuhan and exhibition posters for the photographs of Fredrich Cantor. He has revisited those works in his own books, but they also appear in design history surveys, acknowledging contributions he made to the transformation of Swiss Style typographic design into Postmodernism (coincident with efforts by Weingart, April Greiman, Dan Friedman and others). In 1998, he wrote and produced an excellent book titled Typography: Macro and Microaesthetics: Fundamentals of Typographic Design, which argued (by the use of persuasive examples) that the process of designing gains from the use of a double awareness, which he called macro- and microaesthetics. that designers should attend to both the overall layout of a project (the macro) and its finer, more subtle refinements (the micro). That basic idea (long-championed by teachers of drawing and basic design) was not in itself astonishing, but the rigor with which he presented it was.

This second volume is just as exacting as the first, maybe more so; and in title, size and page design, the two look very much alike. Once inside, however (switching to micro mode), it becomes evident that this is not a sequel to the first book, but a companion volume. It advocates the same construction principles but does so with a different text and a new set of visual examples, with the result that either book can stand separately or the two can work together as one extended overview. Among the author's conspicuous strengths is the ability to reduce things to a wonderfully elegant sparseness, whether texts, shapes, or page layouts. Ironically, this may also be one of the reasons why some teachers may hesitate to use this as a classroom text: Unrelieved by juxtaposition with work in other styles, his examples seem too targeted, or, in style, too exclusive. If the concepts that he advocates are universal (and they certainly appear to be), perhaps he would be wise to use visual examples from a wider stylistic range. Or employ a greater diversity of typefaces. Or use a geometric plan (or underlying grid structure) that is sometimes less pronounced.

Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review from Vol. 19 No 4 (Summer 2004).