Wolfgang Weingart introduced the New Wave design movement which spread through his teachings. As we’ve seen in the previous post, Wolfgang Weingart was a lecturer at the Swiss design school. Weingart came to feel that the International Style had reached a stalemate. This means that he felt Swiss design could no longer progress and indeed it was time to change. He was interested in changing the way typography looked, whilst still retaining its meaning. The juxtaposition of type with the chaotic collage inspired by Dada was a constant in the New wave movement, developed by his students, as we’re about to see.

His earlier works included a lot of typographic experiments, but by the mid-70s he started moving towards non-typographic imagery. In the above image we can clearly see his chaotic nature of his experiments where type has been given a whole new use here. This is something that Weingart was particularly focused on. He wanted to challenge the need for legibility of type and try using it in a new way. On further inspection of this example we can see how individual letters are still very much visible and somewhat structured if not a bit separated. To help you visualise the time frame easier, while Weingart was developing his style, pop art and psychedelic designs were popular in the United States, as seen in previous blogs. New Wave took the rebelliousness of these movements and used it to add further expression and creativity to the International Style.

Above: Wolfgang Weingart poster manipulating type (Left), Wet magazine covers, April Greiman (right), 1970s

Taking a big step from Weingarts work followed April Greiman a student of his. Since now she was not restricted to his style she developed her own style while still keeping some of the general characteristics of the New Wave movement. She has used tilted axis, colourful montages, video imagery, typographic innovations, and blurring. Greiman was also one of the first to use the Mac to design. Having the floppy disk now meant that designers could manipulate work easier and distribute images how they pleased. Her work features other characteristics such as the use of cut-out and torn paper aesthetic inspired by James Reid’s Punk, abstract shapes, vibrant block colours, and Ben Day dot texture. 

Nevile Brody is another designer who took the risk to experiment and use original ideas in public work. He confronted the use of new technology and overcame it to produce powerful compositions. Certain characteristics in his works are the uses of hierarchy in type and the use of photography. While Brody seems to use a semblance of a grid, he uses it in a very innovative way giving a bigger emphasis on the text rather than images. Working in the era that Weingart has constructed, Brody has strayed reasonably far from the aesthetic Weingart uses but also has some subtle similarities, like his use of a rotated axis on different layers of text and image.

My favourite artist of New Wave design is Willi Kunz, just because of the method he used to create his compositions.  In his posters for the Columbia University School of Architecture, Willi Kunz uses graphical representations of New York and Paris as a basic part of his designs. Kunz hints at the aesthetic natures of the two cities. By placing New York in a square and Paris in a circle he is able to compare and contrast the two cities. This idea is then used as the basis to explore typographic ideas. Just like Weingart, Kunz disregards strict grid-based arrangement. In fact he starts the visual composition and permits the structure and alignments to grow through the design process. What this means is that he starts designing and then creates any form of grid around the design themselves. Characteristic include, varying type weights as well as varying sizes, layering of images, and order and clarity. Kunz believed that design should be resolved by first working with the typography and then exploring the different possibilities that fit with the project at hand.

Dan Friedman was an American graphic designer who was a major contributor to postmodern design, especially to new-wave typography movement. He studied under Wolfgang Weingart in Basel. He’s known for designing posters, letterheads and even logos. Friedman takes Weingart’s idea of exploding text onto a page, thus breaking the grid layout. He thought of how he could change the nature of typographic forms and see how they would operate as separate objects in floating space. Friedman specialised in composing works by using mainly black and white while having grayscale elements. By adding the technique of photography he adds a second layer of dimensionality, which in turn acts as if the text is juxtaposed to the photograph.

The 80s saw materialism and consumerism grow as blockbuster movies and cable networks exploded. MTV was the first channel dedicated solely to music, and video became more popular. The value of New Wave within graphic design is that improved on Swiss Design, and embraced the new technologies of the time.