Travelling with Rosmarie Tissi

By Julia Novitch — ‘Berlin is so flat’, Ros­marie Tissi tells me over the phone, from her apart­ment on a hill­side over­look­ing Lake Zurich. Biking in Berlin, I appre­ci­ate its flat­ness. Design­ing, I share her lament: there are no vistas. Only the Tele­vi­sion Tower marks the sky­line – a dotted ‘i’.

Form, fea­ture, dimen­sion­al­ity: topo­graphy is import­ant to Tissi; typo­graphy, too. The two words stitch together her remark­able seven-decade design career, during which she has trav­elled to nearly sev­enty coun­tries. She has pro­duced a vast body of work: logo­types and mail­ing suites; advert­ise­ments and pack­aging; magazine covers, books, and posters; a series of bank­notes, a pair of jeans, a coffee cup, a watch face, and a kite; typefaces – a dozen. Her work has been exhib­ited and col­lec­ted inter­na­tion­ally. She has received numer­ous awards and toured the world for juries, work­shops, and lec­tures. Since 1974, she has been a member of the Alli­ance Graph­ique Inter­na­tionale (AGI).

I first came across Tissi’s work in 2011, as a design stu­dent, while brows­ing Meggs’ His­tory of Graphic Design. Glyphs wash onto a golden beach, vari­ously rotated and scaled, over­lap­ping and inter­lock­ing. No instruc­tions for assembly are given; the pile is a puzzle, and puzz­ling is a game of pat­tern recog­ni­tion – of memory and probability.

‘I really like let­ters’, Tissi says of this par­tic­u­lar work, an advert­ise­ment for a print­ing firm. ‘They are like pic­tures’.¹ Her char­ac­ters form a strange kind of sky­line – mul­ti­di­men­sional, more assemblage than col­lage. They can be read semantic­ally as well as pan­or­am­ic­ally: let­ter­forms as land­forms, typo­graphy as topo­graphy. Sur­vey­ing this land­scape reveals the word ‘OFFSET’, a print­ing method listed among the firm’s ser­vices. As a noun, it solves Tissi’s puzzle. As a verb, it deciphers her design prac­tice: to offset is to dis­place, to pur­pose­fully mis­align or coun­ter­act; per­haps it decodes the larger visual ten­sion Tissi cre­ates between order and dis­order, func­tion­al­ism and expressiveness.

Between­ness is not only a meth­od­o­logy for Tissi, but a lived exper­i­ence. She is a trav­el­ler between geo­graph­ical regions, spend­ing long peri­ods of time away from Zurich, and between design move­ments, nav­ig­at­ing irrev­er­ently around trends and dogmas. Her body of work res­ists easy cat­egor­isa­tion; it is neither wholly modern, nor post­mod­ern. As she explains in a 2018 inter­view with cur­ator Linda Hol­ster, ‘For me, inde­pend­ence has always been import­ant, and my inner power, a guid­ing com­pass. I wanted to invent things’.² Her career offers just such a map to an altern­ate design uni­verse, expand­ing out­ward from a path uniquely hers.

Tissi was born on Feb­ru­ary 13, 1937 in Thayngen, Switzer­land. In sec­ond­ary school, she grav­it­ated toward sci­ences like chem­istry and geo­graphy. She cred­its classes in geo­metry and tech­nical draw­ing with provid­ing a found­a­tional skill set for her later design prac­tice. At the time, these latter two sub­jects were dir­ec­ted only at boys, while ‘girls were taught nee­dle­work’, she recalls.³ Tissi peti­tioned school admin­is­trat­ors to join these courses; she received reluct­ant per­mis­sion along­side heightened pres­sure to earn top marks. One of Tissi’s older sis­ters, already a graphic designer, inspired her decision to enter the field.

By 1953, Tissi had enrolled at the Kun­st­gew­erbeschule in Zurich. Fol­low­ing a one-year pre­lim­in­ary pro­gram, stu­dents entered into four-year appren­tice­ships. Tissi began this on-site train­ing at a firm based in Win­ter­thur, where she was asked more often to clean than design. Unhappy, she appealed her place­ment and began search­ing for a new studio. ‘I looked in every magazine about graphic design’, she recalls. There she dis­covered a small group of Zurich-based design­ers whose work she admired, among them Josef Müller-Brock­mann, Carl B. Graf, and Siegfried Oder­matt. Oder­matt, work­ing alone at the time, brought her on board in 1956.

‘When I star­ted, it was of course a very good time for Swiss graphic design’, Tissi notes.⁴ During the 1950s, graphic design was becom­ing an increas­ingly pre­val­ent force in every­day lives through advert­ising and pack­aging, posters and pro­mo­tions; it was also coales­cing into a recog­nis­able career field. In 1955, Con­crete painter and designer Karl Ger­st­ner asked Alfred Roth, editor of the Swiss Werkbund journal Werk, if he might con­sider includ­ing an art­icle on graphic design; Roth insisted on an entire issue devoted to the design industry, with Ger­st­ner as com­mis­sioner, editor, and designer. Ger­st­ner soli­cited art­icles and work samples from sev­eral of his design col­leagues, among them Siegfried Oder­matt.⁵

Five years earlier, Oder­matt had opened his own studio; his cli­ents ranged from phar­ma­ceut­ical com­pan­ies to print­ers. Here, Tissi soon began her second appren­tice­ship – which would, over the course of five dec­ades, become a lifelong col­lab­or­a­tion – with assign­ments in advert­ising and pack­aging. Her work received early recog­ni­tion. Design journal and spokes-object of Swiss post­war mod­ern­ism Neue Grafik fea­tured one of her posters in its inaug­ural issue of Septem­ber 1958. Cre­ated when she was just nine­teen years old and selec­ted for the issue by designer Hans Neuburg, the poster advert­ised a week­end fall fair in her home vil­lage of Thayngen. Tissi had designed it in her per­sonal time, overnight, at Oder­matt’s studio. ‘He was rather impressed by what he saw and praised my way of hand­ling the com­pos­i­tion’, Tissi recalls.⁶

Typo­grafis­che Monatsblätter pub­lished the first solo fea­ture of Tissi’s work in its Novem­ber 1962 issue. Cur­ator and art journ­al­ist Margit Staber, who would later become the first dir­ector of the Museum Haus Kon­struktiv, authored an accom­pa­ny­ing pro­file. Staber high­lighted the ‘stim­u­lat­ing qual­ity and unique­ness’ of Tissi’s designs, citing her par­tic­u­lar interest in devel­op­ing com­pos­i­tions ‘remin­is­cent of solv­ing a puzzle’.⁷ Such letter puzzles are a hall­mark of Tissi’s work in this issue: an enig­mat­ic­ally type­set card, prin­ted on trans­par­ent paper, folds to com­plete a New Year’s wish; a logo­type on a pro­gramme cover repeats as con­crete poetry.

Staber also praised Tissi’s abil­ity to find a path between ‘eco­nomic think­ing aimed at mass con­sump­tion and cre­at­ive, expert think­ing’. She added, ‘For a young graphic designer, and espe­cially for a young woman graphic designer, to assert one­self in this con­flict of needs and desires is no small achieve­ment’.⁸ Staber her­self was well-poised to under­stand the chal­lenges faced by women in pre­dom­in­antly male fields; hers was the art world, in which she worked most closely with Max Bill. In a later fea­ture on Tissi’s work in the August / Septem­ber 1965 issue of Typo­grafis­che Monatsblätter, Staber again praised Tissi’s grit: ‘The fact that she is per­sever­ing on this path as a woman addi­tion­ally speaks to her favour’, she wrote.⁹

Tissi is con­scious of having worked as a designer during less gender equit­able dec­ades. In our con­ver­sa­tion, she recalls how cli­ents and col­leagues often misat­trib­uted her work to Oder­matt; they ignored her con­tri­bu­tions, asking to speak dir­ectly to Oder­matt instead. Male cli­ents in par­tic­u­lar doubted her abil­it­ies to execute work. ‘They think a woman can’t do good things’, Tissi explains to me, describ­ing a per­vas­ive sexist mind­set. Oder­matt was an excep­tion: ‘He always pushed my work and my efforts’, she notes, adding ‘I think he was ahead of his time in that way’.¹⁰

From 1968 onward, Tissi and Oder­matt entered into a busi­ness part­ner­ship, a move sug­ges­ted by Oder­matt in order to put the pair on more equal stand­ing. ‘But it only kind of worked’, Tissi notes, as cli­ents con­tin­ued to ask to speak to her ‘boss’.¹¹ Tissi attrib­utes some of this sexism to Swiss cul­ture, noting that women did not receive the vote until 1971, when she was thirty-four years old. ‘Switzer­land is a macho coun­try’, she tells me. The rest she attrib­utes to jeal­ousy and com­pet­i­tion: ‘Most of them simply didn’t want to accept that a woman could also be suc­cess­ful’.¹² Tissi remarks on how few woman design stu­dents con­tin­ued into the pro­fes­sional field due to the pres­sures of mar­riage and child-rear­ing. As a result, she notes, ‘There weren’t that many female graphic design­ers in my daily life’.¹³

For Tissi, slights from male col­leagues and cli­ents served only as motiv­a­tion. Her work, as Staber noted, is born of tenacity; her fem­in­ism lies in the lived exper­i­ence of having suc­ceeded in mostly male-dom­in­ated spaces, where such suc­cess was largely framed by men. Tissi’s accom­plish­ments are their own demon­stra­tion against the gender imbal­ance that char­ac­ter­ised the design field; her vis­ib­il­ity is her protest.

Tissi and Oder­matt’s studio was loc­ated in a loft at Schipfe 45, a prime loc­a­tion in down­town Zurich. Tissi’s desk over­looked Lind­en­hof Park; Oder­matt’s, the Limmat River. They worked without assist­ants and main­tained sep­ar­ate cli­ents, although col­lab­or­a­tion was non­ethe­less an import­ant part of their dynamic. They dis­cussed pro­jects at the outset to determ­ine who might best fit a given client’s needs; they also cri­tiqued each other’s work through­out the design process.

Tissi has worked on a wide range of pro­jects, both cul­tural and com­mer­cial. Her design pro­cess began – and still begins – with a blank sheet of paper, and often involves many drafts. She jumps between hand-sketch­ing and, since 2000, com­puter soft­ware. Tissi gen­er­ates all of her own art­work. She holds equal alle­gi­ance to serif and sans-serif typefaces, and mixes both with alpha­bets of her own design. She never begins with a grid: ‘I am freer in the way I work’, she notes.¹⁴ Semb­lances of align­ments and geo­met­ric rela­tion­ships under­pin her work, only to break down in unusual ways. An overt sym­bology invests her min­imal designs with unfold­ing stor­ies and double mean­ings: graphic sim­pli­city as syn­ec­doche, rather than sparsity. Bright, solid col­ours punch through ambi­gu­ity. Tissi’s work com­mu­nic­ates with a bold­ness approach­ing that of a signal, while non­ethe­less remain­ing a bit more mys­ter­i­ous, intric­ate, and unexpected.

Tissi’s posters in par­tic­u­lar pos­sess flag-like qual­it­ies: express­ive, com­mand­ing, dis­tinct­ive even at a dis­tance; she describes using a ‘redu­cing glass’ as often as a mag­ni­fy­ing glass in order to ensure legib­il­ity at dif­fer­ent scales.¹⁵ Line, rect­angle, circle; sun, moon, cloud: ‘These form-fig­ures, partly archi­tec­tural, partly play­ful, are quite free from all schem­atic rigid­ity’, noted cur­ator and art his­tor­ian Willy Rotz­ler in the March 1984 issue of Typo­grafis­che Monatsblätter. ‘And the same applies to the choice of let­ter­ing and the prin­ciples of its use’, he added.¹⁶ For Tissi, even small type is fair game for off-grid explor­a­tions; it angles and bends, frames and contours.

Col­leagues, crit­ics, and his­tor­i­ans often describe Tissi’s approach as ‘intu­it­ive’, ‘play­ful’, and ‘spon­tan­eous’ – a some­what gender-tinged vocab­u­lary. But these adject­ives belie the hard logic that under­girds her designs. Tissi is a tech­ni­cian; in a min­imal palette, she finds max­imal res­on­ance, visual and tex­tual. With tac­tical rigour, she moves ele­ments into pos­i­tion over mul­tiple ver­sions of a single work until she achieves near-dia­gram­matic clar­ity. ‘I do rough sketches in my head of count­less ideas, model some of them in paper, move them around, test vari­ous designs. I see pat­terns and flows’, she explains.¹⁷ Rotz­ler remarked upon this ‘spon­tan­eous “work­shop” qual­ity’ vis­ible in the final work: ‘The observer is stim­u­lated and feels that he is involved in a pro­cess, not just pass­ively con­fron­ted by the fin­ished product’.¹⁸

Tissi cred­its this iter­at­ive work­ing pro­cess with enabling her to sys­tem­at­ic­ally pursue new ideas and dis­cov­er­ies. Her free-form, explor­at­ory meth­od­o­logy – designer Wolfgang Weingart called Tissi and Oder­matt’s studio ‘more a kind of labor­at­ory’ – has allowed Tissi to extend an oth­er­wise rigid and dog­matic tra­di­tion of design into a more ver­sat­ile, open-ended func­tion­al­ism.¹⁹ In this sense, her works are adversarial – not against client or audi­ence, but against the post­war Swiss design ortho­doxy that would come to be known as the Inter­na­tional Style.

The mid-cen­tury ubi­quity of this style is dif­fi­cult to under­es­tim­ate. Pub­lic­a­tions like Neue Grafik – cre­ated and edited by the style’s lead prac­ti­tion­ers – codi­fied it into a meth­od­o­logy and move­ment. Design­ers could execute it for­mu­la­ic­ally: sans-serif typefaces, asym­met­rical lay­outs, grid­ded arrange­ments, flush-left set­tings. ‘You didn’t need any ima­gin­a­tion’, Tissi notes.²⁰ On their sur­face, Tissi’s designs – espe­cially her early works – play into sim­ilar visual tropes through her use of con­struct­iv­ist forms and emphasis on min­im­al­ism. ‘Work is often much better with less’, she argues, in a refrain that res­on­ates well with mod­ern­ism.²¹ Tissi dir­ectly acknow­ledges the Inter­na­tional Style’s appeal and influ­ence: ‘I like its clean­li­ness and clar­ity and all that, but’ – and it’s a crit­ical ‘but’ for her – ‘it lacks joy’.²²

‘Some of my work at the begin­ning was very Swiss, too, because I hadn’t found my way’, she notes. ‘But over­all’, she adds, ‘Swiss design didn’t have soul’.²³ Tissi has vari­ously described it as ‘too grave and dig­ni­fied’,²⁴ ‘too heavy’,²⁵ ‘too one-sided and geo­met­rical’,²⁶ ‘too cold and con­struc­ted’,²⁷ and ‘too rigid, lack­ing viva­city’.²⁸ Tissi’s chan­nel­ling of joy, on the other hand, pro­duces designs that are brightly lit, puzzle-like, idio­syn­cratic, and beck­on­ing – any­thing but neut­ral. Yet she not­ably eschews the irony, kitsch, and pop of post­mod­ern­ism; she strives instead at sin­cere mes­saging and res­on­ance. Clear com­mu­nic­a­tion and ori­gin­al­ity are com­pat­ible in Tissi’s work; mean­ings bounce across a design and land without subterfuge.

In her early years, Tissi recalls draw­ing inspir­a­tion from abroad more so than in Switzer­land, par­tic­u­larly from Amer­ican and Italian design­ers. She counts Paul Rand, Saul Bass, Gene Fed­erico, George Tscherny, and Franco Grig­nani among her influ­ences.²⁹ Her atten­tion to their work speaks not only to the devel­op­ment of her own style, but to the vibrant design atmo­sphere of the 1950s and 1960s. Inter­na­tional exchanges of ideas and tech­niques were not only pos­sible, but prob­able, through the growth of design schools, pub­lic­a­tions, exhib­i­tions, com­pet­i­tions, and inter­na­tional conferences.

To develop an altern­ate visual lan­guage to what was then becom­ing one of Switzer­land’s most valu­able cul­tural com­mod­it­ies was roguish. As Weingart observed in a 1986 fea­ture of the studio in Graphis, Tissi and Oder­matt had evolved toward the pos­i­tion of ‘inspired out­siders’ within the very same Zurich design scene that had once nur­tured them, and which they in turn had helped to develop. ‘It seems as though both returned from a long jour­ney years ago to an exotic planet’, Weingart wrote – ‘from an excit­ing excur­sion on which they com­pletely lost the hair-split­ting, all too dis­cip­lined graph­ics of many of their col­leagues’.³⁰ Shun­ning uni­ver­sal appeal by divert­ing from the well-trod­den path of mod­ern­ism meant resid­ing instead in the realm of cult appeal: the land of design­ers’ designers.

Out­si­der­ness might be the state in which Tissi feels most at home. She describes a dis­in­terest in design trends, then and now; she does not recall social­ising much in Zurich design circles. Quite the oppos­ite: for sev­eral weeks or months at a time, Tissi would dis­en­gage entirely from design, leav­ing Switzer­land for another part of the world. ‘I trav­elled without think­ing about being a graphic designer’, she tells me. ‘If you think all the time about your pro­fes­sion’, she adds, ‘you lose the proportions’.

These trips served not as sources of inspir­a­tion, but immers­ive escapes. Tissi always trav­elled alone; accom­pani­ment implied dis­trac­tion. ‘Then you still have a piece of home with you’, she explains to me. She only rarely con­tac­ted family, friends, and col­leagues. She shunned work assign­ments and declined to visit other design prac­ti­tion­ers or stu­dios during her travels. ‘My goal was my free­dom’, she explains, ‘and with Oder­matt I had that free­dom. I could go and he would carry on work­ing with the cli­ents’.³¹ She found this dis­tance from her work both neces­sary and renew­ing: she ‘would always come back a new person’.³²

Suit­cases rest on top of the book­shelves in her Zurich apart­ment. From a young age, Tissi recalls pos­sess­ing what she describes to me as a ‘desire to dis­cover the world’. Her first trip abroad was to the United States in 1963: ‘99 dol­lars for 99 days’, she recalls – a boom­ing time for com­mer­cial air tour­ism. She rode by Grey­hound bus to pop­u­lar sites like the Grand Canyon and White Sands, then crossed south into the Mex­ican states of Sin­aloa and Sonora, relieved to escape the bus’s air con­di­tion­ing. Tissi trav­elled again to the United States and Mexico in 1966, and has returned to Mexico three times since. Leav­ing Switzer­land – and her design work – for weeks or months at a time, she would often arrive back home with no assign­ments on the table. ‘To fill the time’, as she puts it, she began pen-and-ink exper­i­ments in typeface design. In 1972, during a par­tic­u­larly fruit­ful inter­mis­sion between travel abroad and com­mis­sioned work, she cre­ated her first two alpha­bets: Sin­aloa, and its vari­ant, Sonora.

Aside from basic instruc­tion in type design during her art school years, Tissi is largely self-taught in letter-making. She begins with the char­ac­ters ‘A’, ‘B’, and ‘C’, and then quickly moves to ‘S’. ‘If the “S” doesn’t work, none of it works’, she explains to me. Tissi has always turned to cre­at­ing typefaces during lulls in her work. The COVID-19  pan­demic led to a par­tic­u­larly pro­duct­ive period for her, during which she cre­ated five new alphabets.

Tissi’s typefaces are each named after her des­tin­a­tions abroad: Sin­aloa, Sonora, Mindanao, Palawan, Sarawak, Vanuatu, and more; her type cata­logue is a travelogue. But as Tissi notes, her alpha­bets are not souven­irs. Noth­ing is bor­rowed or appro­pri­ated; the let­ter­forms share no graphic con­nec­tion to the places after which they are titled. Tissi chose these par­tic­u­lar des­tin­a­tions instead for their aes­thet­ic­ally pleas­ing letter combinations.

Tissi’s let­ter­forms are case stud­ies in mini­ature of the dimen­sion­al­ity she is able to achieve with flat, mono­chro­matic sur­faces. ‘It’s incred­ibly reward­ing to design let­ters in that way, in chal­len­ging sys­tems. It’s a dif­fer­ent way of think­ing and embra­cing the lan­guage of sym­bols’, she explains.³³ Gradi­ents and shad­ows make few appear­ances in her work; she relies instead on pat­tern and pos­i­tion to create optical illu­sions. Per­spect­ives are ambigu­ous and unre­solved; forms can be seen to both recede and approach sim­ul­tan­eously, a kin­etic effect akin to a dolly zoom. Many of Tissi’s logos and logo­types, too, mine a sim­ilar ter­rit­ory of heightened dimen­sion­al­ity; curi­os­ity piques over how she might have exten­ded any single one into a full alphabet.

Tissi’s let­ter­forms have a sci­ence fic­tional qual­ity – not because the stripes in Sin­aloa sug­gest warp speed, or because the pixel­la­tion in Sarawak invokes the digital age – but because they deeply estrange their audi­ences from the con­ven­tions of Swiss type design. ‘Every­one was using the same typeface’, Tissi recalls.³⁴ Only one can­did­ate comes to mind, also named after a geo­graph­ical place: Hel­vetica. Tissi proudly notes that she has never used it in her work. Her alpha­bets strive for any­thing but Hel­vetica’s mod­ern­ist qual­it­ies: sup­posed neut­ral­ity, legib­il­ity, sparsity. They are com­posed instead of highly inflec­ted dis­play let­ter­forms – loud, logo-like, exclus­ively upper­case, and wholly unsuited to long-form read­ing. Tissi’s typefaces ven­ture as far abroad from Hel­vetica as they pos­sibly can; no wonder she has named them after her travels away.

One of Tissi’s alpha­bets in par­tic­u­lar has stirred the ima­gin­a­tions of design­ers every­where and seeped into a global public con­scious­ness. Sin­aloa is a brazenly futur­istic dis­play typeface – part pat­tern, part geo­met­ric con­struc­tion – and Tissi’s first com­mer­cially released alpha­bet. Pub­lished in 1974 by Brit­ish let­ter­ing firm Letra­set, in its top-tier Letra­graph­ica range, Sin­aloa ‘tapped into the zeit­geist of the 1970s’, explains typo­grapher and designer Florian Hard­wig.³⁵

Sin­aloa is highly sys­tem­atic, yet still sculp­tural; its eccent­ri­city rounds out its hard­ness. It has no closed coun­ters, link­ing it to a long tra­di­tion of sten­cil – a genre asso­ci­ated with speed, ship­ping, and travel. Its let­ter­forms appear mid-mater­i­al­isa­tion, as if under­go­ing tele­port­a­tion; they shim­mer into focus through Tissi’s use of par­al­lel lines. Inter­pret­a­tions of these stripes are end­less: tonal grad­a­tions of sun­rises, heat waves radi­at­ing off tar­macs, window shades admit­ting cool moon­light. As motion lines, they propel the let­ters into deep space. As optical pat­terns, they illus­ively mix figure and ground. As hatch­ing, they con­tour flat forms into three dimen­sions in the manner of wood­cuts. Sin­aloa: a portal from Cap­tain Kirk to Albrecht Dürer.

‘Tissi had a very clear idea of what she wanted those let­ters to be’, states Cornel Wind­lin, designer and founder of Swiss type foundry Lineto. ‘They are rad­ical, kind of impossible – not aiming to please. The whole alpha­bet is really quite out there some­how’, he explains. Tissi agrees: ‘You cannot play around with them because they are so strong’, she tells me.

Non­ethe­less, Sin­aloa abounds in use; as a Letra­set typeface, it has found its way into the hands of thou­sands. Letra­set sheets – peak­ing in sales through­out the 1970s and mid-1980s – were quick to buy, easy to use, and access­ible to all; they soon spread from the pro­fes­sional design world to stu­dents, hob­by­ists, artists, and ama­teur design­ers. Fol­low­ing its 1974 release, Sin­aloa – rather like Ros­marie her­self – trav­elled around the world; it has appeared vari­ously on a t-shirt in Vanuatu, in a Brit­ish video game, as the logo­type for the Citroën BX 4TC, and atop Amer­ican musi­cian Frank Zappa’s letterhead.

On account of their eph­em­eral nature, many Letra­set applic­a­tions of Sin­aloa are likely lost to time. But in the realm of music – rich with fans and col­lect­ors – the impact of Tissi’s typeface can be better visu­al­ised. Sin­aloa took hold across nearly all musical genres and can be found on the album sleeves of estab­lished musi­cians, obscure groups, one-hit won­ders, and pop­u­lar song com­pil­a­tions alike. A tool like Letra­set, with a lower bar­rier to entry, com­bined with the sur­face of the record cover – a more exper­i­mental envir­on­ment for design – cre­ated the per­fect con­di­tions for Sin­aloa to thrive.

Tissi gran­ted pub­lish­ing rights to Letra­set in exchange for roy­al­ties, yet des­pite the typeface’s remark­able pop­ular­ity, these pay­ments ‘didn’t amount to much’, she recalls. In the 1980s, Letra­set began digit­ising its col­lec­tion of typefaces in cooper­a­tion with URW, and later with the Inter­na­tional Typeface Cor­por­a­tion (ITC), which it acquired in 1986. Digit­isa­tion of Sin­aloa likely took place some­time in the 1980s, without Tissi’s con­sulta­tion or involve­ment; digital forensics by Lineto date the earli­est known font file to 1986. Once digit­ised, Sin­aloa quickly spread across the web, spawn­ing mul­tiple unau­thor­ised ver­sions with dif­fer­ing glyph sets. One such ver­sion included a lower­case alpha­bet, which Tissi had neither approved nor ever con­sidered developing.

In 2020, Tissi estab­lished her claim to Sin­aloa’s pub­lish­ing rights and ter­min­ated its dis­tri­bu­tion by Mono­type, Letra­set’s suc­cessor. Three years later, she ini­ti­ated a col­lab­or­a­tion with Lineto for a new digital ver­sion of the typeface based on her draw­ings from 1972. Type designer Céline Oder­matt – no rela­tion to Siegfried Oder­matt – worked closely with Tissi to expand the ori­ginal alpha­bet from around fifty char­ac­ters to over two hun­dred. Oder­matt describes a pro­cess in which she and Tissi exchanged digital sketches, meet­ing in person to dis­cuss and review proofs. Together, they untangled the mul­tiple inter­ven­tions made to Sin­aloa in the years since Tissi first drew the typeface; their work ranged from remod­el­ling the dia­crit­ics and punc­tu­ation ini­tially pro­duced by Letra­set to remov­ing unau­thor­ised expan­sions found in digital font files. Revi­sions to the ori­ginal alpha­bet included the devel­op­ment of entirely new glyphs for con­tem­por­ary use as well as subtle optical adjust­ments to the stripes.

For Oder­matt, pre­serving the tone of the ori­ginal required ‘the sur­prise of work­ing by hand’– a draft­ing pro­cess in which sys­tem­at­isa­tion trans­lated to coher­ence rather than con­form­ity; she high­lights the dif­fer­ence in stripe length and dir­ec­tion between the ‘$’ and ‘S’ glyphs as an inter­est­ing case study. Yet Sin­aloa’s ‘mul­til­ine’ fea­tures – its stripes – are ancil­lary for Oder­matt when char­ac­ter­ising the typeface; she points instead to its dis­tinct­ive ‘mod­u­lar­ity’ and ‘bulk­i­ness’. No con­ceiv­able design for a lower­case could com­ple­ment the heft of the upper­case, she explains; it would be too light and round. She hes­it­ates to place the typeface in a par­tic­u­lar cat­egory or genre: ‘Sin­aloa is really its own thing’, she argues.

Lineto’s release of Sin­aloa – author­ised by its ori­ginal designer for the first time – now marks the typeface’s fiftieth anniversary in cir­cu­la­tion. LL Sin­aloa is com­ple­men­ted by the debut of its vari­ant, LL Sonora; LL Mindanao will follow soon. Typefaces are tools by nature; once pub­lished, they are used by an unknow­able audi­ence, under uncon­trol­lable cir­cum­stances. But it is the cava­lier beha­viour of type com­pan­ies that Tissi’s redi­git­isa­tion seeks to counter. From Letra­set to Lineto, Sin­aloa’s jour­ney epi­tom­ises a half-cen­tury of evol­u­tion in type foundry ser­vices and design rights man­age­ment. For Tissi to have con­trol again of her cre­at­ive output and its future dir­ec­tion is a power­ful form of own­er­ship and agency in the digital era.

Tissi has no plans to retire. ‘I like design­ing things and it never bores me’, she coun­ters.³⁶ After Siegfried Oder­matt died in 2017 at the age of ninety, she moved out of their shared studio and now works from her apart­ment. She has donated com­pre­hens­ive parts of her and Oder­matt’s archive to the Swiss National Museum in Zurich, the Museum für Gestal­tung Zürich, and the Plakat­sammlung der Schule für Gestal­tung Basel, as well as a privately-held design archive in Zurich.

In 2018, Tissi received the Swiss Grand Prix for Design, the highest achieve­ment in design awar­ded by the Swiss Fed­eral Office of Cul­ture. ‘The award came very unex­pec­tedly and made me very happy. It is cer­tainly a great honour to be praised in this way’, Tissi states. ‘It also gives me the motiv­a­tion to carry on with the pro­jects I am work­ing on at the moment’.³⁷ The prize is per­haps the ulti­mate insider accom­plish­ment for an out­sider, and a reminder that Tissi’s inde­pend­ence, too, is an act of design.

In col­lab­or­a­tion with Céline Oder­matt at Lineto, Tissi recently launched a web­site show­cas­ing her body of work at ros­marie-tissi.ch. Yet Tissi eschews the kind of self-pro­mo­tion that lends itself to self-myth­o­lo­gisa­tion and, even­tu­ally, his­tor­icisa­tion. Her focus instead is on the work. Her stand­ards for her­self are her guide, and she con­tin­ues to pro­duce designs that can only be described as entirely her own. Her resi­li­ence gen­er­ously cre­ates space – for the pos­sib­il­ity of other design worlds – and, more import­antly, place – for the poten­tial of inde­pend­ent design­ers. I inhabit this place with gratitude.

During the fall of 2024, Tissi found her­self in Basel to attend an AGI Con­gress, a group exhib­i­tion fea­tur­ing her work at Schule für Gestal­tung (Rid the Grid – Women in Swiss Graphic Design 1900–1980), and Lineto’s exhib­i­tion ded­ic­ated to both Sin­aloa’s legacy and the pub­lic­a­tion of Tissi’s new mono­graph, 12 Alpha­bets and Applic­a­tions, installed at the Basel Poster Col­lec­tion. Her travels con­tinue: only Tissi knows her next des­tin­a­tion, and the typeface it might name.