Chiachi Chao, born and raised in Taiwan, and graduating from ECAL in Lausanne, wins a Swiss Design Award for his variable typeface Kleisch. The quasi-baroque shapes are designed to match various CJK Ming typefaces in a number of features as well as visual parameters. It’s a reversal of the usual process in Western type design, which tries to match typefaces from other scripts to the Latin shapes that serve as presumed ‘templates’. Chiachi joined Lineto in 2022, and for the rest of the story please consult the entry on Weichi He from 2021. Conditions on the job market haven’t changed yet for non-EU graduates of Swiss schools.

What can a single visual item be worth in the digital floodlands filled with ‘poor images’? Nazareno Crea’s New York-based type office ABC ETC tests the waters with a curated selection of stock images by artists and designers launched in October. With licensing models tailored to clients from different sectors, the offer includes photographs, paintings, illustrations and more by Lena Amuat & Zoé Meyer, Laurent Benner, Norm, Samuel Nyholm and Olga Prader, to name just a few. The range is divers, but be assured that all creators are decidedly human.

After feeding sophisticated type-related visual mini essays on Instagram for a few years, Laurenz Brunner finally launches Source Type, his wonderland for all things type in late April. Investigating type’s ever-evolving cultural, social and political dimensions, an international team of collaborators including Ben Schwartz, Selina Bernet, Clemens Piontek and Min Ling is set to produce a broad range of journalistic features, episodic observations, design research pieces, personal commentary and more – all in elaborate, yet straightforward text-and-image pieces formatted for convenient consumption on your mobile. Ah, and there are fonts, of course, and a shop attached to it, too.

When the Russian army invades Ukraine on 24 February, Yevgeniy Anfalov and Oles Gergun’s Kyiv Type Foundry (KTF) has been operating for seven month. They don’t have to announce their boycott of the Russian market, as people just stop buying. The main focus of KTF’s activities is the rich type history from Pre-, Soviet- and Post-Soviet times on the territory of modern Ukraine, yet the remarkably multi-cultural legacy from the USSR is threatened at a time of ‘Greater Russia’ aspirations. Still, there are plenty of markets for Cyrilillc typefaces which KTF serves, such as Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Bulgaria. As Anfalov has been based in Germany for a while, KTF is also offering some Latin counterparts to their Cyrillic typefaces.

Sometimes the first use of a typeface can be so subtle that you barely notice. Luca Pellegrini’s LL Electa debuts on a few pages in a Julia Born-designed catalogue about US journalist-turned-painter Charmion von Wiegand. Wiegand was a close friend and collaborator to Piet Mondrian during the last years of his life, before she became a fixture in post-war exhibitions of abstract art with her own painterly explorations of geometric – yet decidedly more extravagant – shapes. Born uses a specially commissioned beta version of Electa to represent Weigand’s voice, as it appears in excerpts from her letters and writings. It’s an elegant nod to the era that shaped the main historical reference for Electa, which is a high-modernist (if post-Bauhaus) typewriter font designed by Xanti Schawinsky for Olivetti in the 1930s.

Weichi He, born and raised in Santiago de Chile, and graduating from ECAL in Lausanne, wins a Swiss Design Award with his variable typeface Photonic, a three-weight serif typeface family inspired by Oswald Cooper’s idiosyncratic Cooper Black (1922). Weichi projects how Cooper’s heavy shapes might look in a very slim and in an intermediate weight. Joining Lineto in early 2021, Weichi was granted a permanent working permit after a lengthy and arduous application process, which eventually needed the involvement of a high-profile consulting firm. Against this background, the Swiss Design Award appears as a friendly nod from a country which typically has a hard time admitting non-EU graduates of its high-profile universities to the domestic job market.

On 3 February, André Gürtler (*1936) passes away at the age of 84. Gürtler worked with Adrian Frutiger in Paris following 1959, where he substantially contributed to the extensive Univers project and almost single-handedly developed Concorde (later called Roissy, released to market as Frutiger). In the late 1960s, Linotype published his typefaces Basilia and Egyptian 505. With his colleague and friend Christian Mengelt, Gürtler taught at Kunstgewerbeschule Basel and formed the Letterform Research & Design Team (later joined by Erich Gschwind, and renamed Team’77), which authored the typefaces Media, Signa and, most importantly, Haas Unica. A committed editor at Typographische Monatsblätter (TM), Gürtler was internationally revered as a pre-eminent practitioner, resourceful researcher and charismatic educator, lecturing in universities and design schools around the globe. André Gürtler’s estate may be accessed at Kantonsbibliothek St. Gallen. Our heartfelt condolences to Anna Gürtler-Wehrli.

On 26 November, a member of the Zurich city council unveils a memorial plaque to honour Swiss soccer legend Jakob ‘Köbi’ Kuhn (1943–2019), who was both a splendid midfielder in his Twenties and Thirties and a highly successful coach of the national team in his Sixties. The plaque is made of raw copper and installed at the façade of the house in which Kuhn grew up, at Fritschistrasse 3, in one of Zurich’s former working class neighborhoods. In a subtle homage to the intricate relationship between soccer and beer, the plaques engraving was typeset in LL Brauer, by none other than the font’s creator, Marco Walser of Elektrosmog. As it happens, Elektrosmog’s studio is just around the corner.

Coinciding with the launch of their self-initiated publication, Dimension of Two, the first ever solo exhibition of long-term Lineto partners NORM is set up at Museum für Gestaltung in Zurich. On the day of the scheduled opening, all museums and public institutions across Switzerland go into lockdown mode to prevent further spreading of the Covid-19 virus. This leaves room only for an improvised, ultra-private private view for the smallest circle of family and friends. After almost three months as a ghost show, ‘NORM: It’s Not Complicated’ finally opens to welcome its first official visitors.

Six new bells are consecrated at Leipzig’s oldest church, St. Nikolai, on 30 June. Five of them, called Credo, Pax, Benedictus, Sanctus and Agnus Dei, carry bible quotations in a script hand-drawn by Tobias-David Albert. Together with two older bells, the new ones ring for the first time on 9 October, to celebrate the 30th anniversary of what is called the ‘peaceful revolution’ of 1989. In October of that year, weekly demonstrations at St. Nikolai played a part in eventually bringing down the Berlin wall, on 9 November 1989.

Elektrosmog’s last season with Theater Chur is launched. For 10 years, they have made posters with a two-layered customised design for small print runs. First, colourful backgrounds are silkscreen printed for an entire season with Jacques & Madelaine Uldry in Berne. Later the information about the individual plays and events is photocopied over in editions of 80 each.

Bobst Graphic 1972–1981 is a research publication written and designed by Giliane Cachin. After spotting the label Bobst Graphic on a slide in a François Rappo lecture at ECAL, back in 2013, Giliane asked her father, who is working at Bobst, a globally active provider of precision machinery for the printing industry, about its history. He connected her to former CEO Bruno de Kalbermatten, who was ready to share his memories as well as his archive. Further research, financed by ECAL allowed Giliane to show and tell the story of Bobst’s ultimately failed attempt to become a leading producer of digital photo-typesetting machines and accompanying fonts. One of their last typefaces released was Haas Unica by Team’77, now LL Unica77.

Laurenz Brunner takes over responsibility for the identity of new Schauspielhaus Zürich, working with designated directors Nicolas Stemann and Benjamin von Blomberg. As one of the very first steps, new lettering at the venerable Pfauen building has to be planned. The sketches unleash a wave of bureaucratic worries about the possible distraction of car drivers.

Nazareno Crea’s New York-based office for type and logo design ABC ETC INC., founded in 2018, draws Waldorf Astoria Display for client Noë & Associates. It’s a digital update of the original 1931 design engraved in the hotel’s façade.

Robert Huber draws an update of Eurostile, Aldo Novarese’s famous 1962 font for Nebiolo. He applies it firstly for the Biennale de l’image en movement (BIM), and then later for the visual identity of the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève.

Stephan Müller establishes a Leipzig-based foundry dedicated to the research and reconstruction of historical fonts. Forgotten Shapes first release Gerstner-Programm (1964–67), Karl Gerstner’s take on adapting Akzidenz Grotesk. The font had been executed by Gerstner employee Christian Mengelt, later a member of Team’77. Not unlike what Team’77 would go on to do with Unica, Gerstner and Mengelt had already tried to establish a neo-modernist, distinctly non-geometric sans serif for the age of photo-typesetting.

Arve Båtevik completes his MA in Art Direction at the ECAL. His thesis project examines 18 geometric sans-serif fonts from the first half of the 20th century. The aim is to achieve a synthesis, finding an essential font of its kind, bringing a conclusion to a debate that has dominated the last decade.

Having already served for several years as a visiting thesis critic for MFA Graphic Design at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Providence, James Goggin accepts a permanent position and moves from the Midwest to the East Coast. He combines teaching with continued international projects for Practise, the graphic design studio he has been running with Shan James for close to two decades.

After an attempt at a soft re-design of The New Yorker by creative director Wyatt Mitchell raises objections from a readership deeply rooted in tradition, and after Mitchell leaves for Apple in early 2015, the magazine hires former art director at the New York Times Book Review, Nicholas Blechman. The son of legendary cartoonist R.O. Blechman, Nicholas is originally an illustrator himself, and he brings on Nico Schweizer as an art director focusing on graphic design. Together they set out to un-do several features of the re-design, making the magazine resemble more its original form. In the process, a few of the fonts are updated, such as The New Yorker’s version of Caslon, which, in the digital age, is in need of improved hinting.

Having worked on the corporate identity and typeface of Swatch with the help of Aurèle Sack for several years, NORM produce an updated manual for the client with an expanded version. Containing both a Cyrillic and an Arabic script of SwatchCT, this marks NORM’s first steps beyond the Latin script. The Cyrillic version, developed as of 2012, also marks NORM’s first collaboration with Viktoriya Grabowska. In the process, Grabowska also contributes to NORM’s new Heavy cut of LL Replica (2014), and from 2015 becomes a regular collaborator of Lineto.

Rafael Koch and Mauro Paolozzi release Cinetype with Lucerne-based foundry Grilli Type. A work in progress for several years, Cinetype pays homage to the disappearing technology of putting subtitles onto analog film. In this anachronistic procedure, letters are created by removing colour layers from the film with a laser beam. Referencing the resulting shapes, the curves of the new digital letters – primarily intended for print – are drawn using multiple straight lines.

Robert Huber lifts an unusual ‘Grotesk’ from an 1894 German Schriften Atlas, and does a quick sketch of a single weight, called RH Inter. It is introduced in the Jonathan Hares-designed book Architecture from the Arab World 1914–2014 as part of the Kingdom of Bahrain’s national participation at the Venice Architecture Biennale. The book is printed in an edition of 30,000 plus and used to fill in a circular shelf-like structure in the pavilion. It is given away for free and goes on to win a Gold Medal at the Leipzig-based ‘Best Book Design from all over the World’ competition. Six years later, RH Inter will have become a full font family and is released under the name LL Medium.

Designing a photo book by Stephen Shore about travels in Israel, Kobi Benezri re-activates his unpublished Arab and Hebrew versions of LL Gravur Condensed (2003/04). Navigational elements of the book are set in English, Hebrew, and Arabic, alluding to Israel’s famously trilingual road-signs, as well as to the issue of national design standards addressed by LL Gravur Condensed.

A dry but very thoroughly researched publication coming out of ECAL, 30 Years of Swiss Typographic Discourse in the Typographische Monatsblätter, wins Louise Paradis and Robert Huber their first ‘Most Beautiful Swiss Books’ award. This successful book, complete with an historic online archive, refocuses a whole generation of designers on the merits of discipline, formal rigour and austerity, which is enthusiastically embraced for its near-exotic quality. The entire book is typeset in Haas Unica, a self-evident contender for the job, in a custom version made for the occasion.

In 2010 James Goggin receives an unexpected invitation to move to the US as Director of Design and Publishing at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Two years later, he also has the chance to give a tour of the building and the collection to the newly appointed president of a Swiss wine marketing association, Pierre Keller, as well as to his successor at ECAL, Alexis Georgacopoulos, when they are in town together.

On 4 December, French President François Hollande opens the new museum Louvre-Lens. The building is designed by SANAA, who have commissioned an ‘invisible’ signage from NORM, based on their LL Replica. NORM was invited for an interview when SANAA discovered their work on a book about Swiss architects Décosterd & Rahm, Physiologische Architektur (2002), and they were subsequently chosen after a search that included no less than ten graphic design offices. The new Louvre becomes an instant success, with almost 900,000 visitors counted during its first year of operation.

Jonas Williamson, a member of legendary Swedish/Swiss REALA collective until its dissolution in 2007, comes across a hitherto unknown version of Tratex, the font for Swedish road signs. He initiates a process of research, experimentation and digital re-drawing, aiming at a full digital release of this forgotten treasure.

In a large-format publication about serial art by former Bauhaus Dessau disciple Kurt Kranz, Stephan Müller employs his digital re-drawing of Edel Grotesk. As recent research by Indra Kupferschmid has established, this anonymous font, also called Normal Grotesk, was created by Leipzig-based punch-cutters Wagner & Schmidt in the 1910s and was soon after widely distributed in the form of templates that foundries could use to mould their own metal types. One of the versions is selected by Jan Tschichold for his epoch-defining book Neue Typographie (1928), in order to underline the programmatic claim that entire books can be typeset with grotesk fonts.

Cornel Windlin takes over visual communications at Schauspielhaus Zurich for a second time, now under director Barbara Frey. He brings in Gregor Huber to work with an ultra-minimalistic identity based on a big black disc, vaguely reminiscent of Bill and other members of the Konkrete Kunst circle. On posters, leaflets and in magazines, the dot is superimposed over eye-catching and often controversial imagery, all sourced from mass media archives. As for the typeface, a bootleg version of the mysterious Haas Unica is chosen for its minimalism, sophistication, Swissness and indirect relation to Concrete Art. Hoping to do with a single cut for all applications at all sizes and across all media, extensive tests are performed; the conclusion is that all existing weights are either too light or too heavy. With the help of Radek Sidun, a Czech type designer interning at the time, they create a new medium cut and change all punctuation to reference the new black dot logo. Cornel and Gregor leave after one season, and pick up several prestigious awards for the whole body of work. The black dot and Unica Medium stay in use for ten years, until Laurenz Brunner steps in to redefine the identity.

A direct descendant of the spray-paint drawing robot Hektor (2002), Jürg Lehni’s Viktor uses chalk to write on gigantic blackboards. Debuted at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in 2008, Viktor is featured prominently for various wall paintings and performances by Jürg and Alex Rich in an exhibition at Kunsthalle St. Gallen, ‘Things to Say’. For one of the paintings, Jürg and Alex use the five line version of LL Prismaset in development, letting Viktor write ‘Back in Five’.

The journalistic reader Ein Tag im Leben von, edited by Zurich-based publisher Walter Keller and designed by Elektrosmog, wins a gold medal in the annual ‘Best Book Design from all over the World’ competition, based in Leipzig.

As Julia Hasting is promoted to Creative Director at Phaidon Press, owner Richard Schlagman asks her to work from his headquarters in Ascona, Switzerland. Julia and her husband Kobi Benezri, Art Director at the International Design Magazine (I.D.), leave the NY metropolitan area to settle on the shores of Lake Ticino. Eventually they relocate to Zurich, where Kobi sets up his independent studio for graphic design in 2008. Among other clients, he starts working for Phaidon as well.

Cornel Windlin is appointed Head of the ‘Most Beautiful Swiss Books’ jury, succeeding François Rappo. Like Rappo before him, he simultaneously becomes a member of the Swiss Federal Commission of Design, which oversees the Swiss Design Awards. He fulfills both mandates until 2011, when the duty of book jury chair is handed over to NORM’s Manuel Krebs, and the seat on the Design Commission to Laurent Benner.

NORM provide a funny and striking analysis of a famously contested constellation in type history when they use Univers (1957), Helvetica (1957/60), and Unica (1980) in a single book. The choice is more than fitting, as the book, Home for Homes II, is a text-heavy catalogue by British artist’s collective Art & Language, founded in the late 1960s.

Cornel Windlin and British artist Paul Elliman give a workshop at ECAL entitled ‘If Assholes Could Fly, This Place Would be an Airport’. Students Nazareno Crea and Erol Gemma take the assignment literally, laying out a landing pad with lights on the roof of the school building and taking a spectacular photo from an adjacent tower. They also mail a letter to the school warning of a planned hostage-taking at the ‘airport’, which causes the police to close down the workshop.

NORM win a design competition for the development of a new Swiss banknote series. However, the Swiss National Bank's committee picks second-seated Manuela Pfrunder as executing designer. Eleven (!) years later, in 2016, the banknotes series is launched with the introduction of the 50-Francs bill. The remaining bills for 10, 20, 100, 200 and 1,000 Francs are gradually introduced, with the last one debuting in September 2019.

Cornel Windlin is appointed Creative Director for the new quarterly magazine by Tate Modern, TATE ETC., after Zurich-based curator Bice Curiger wins the pitch with her editorial concept. Working with Bice, as well as with Editor-in-Chief Simon Grant, and with Will Gompertz (who is also serving as James Goggin’s point of contact at Tate at that time), Cornel insists on neither using the Tate logo nor corporate font. Instead a new title font is to be featured in each issue. Cornel invites Goggin alumnus Laurenz Brunner to become a regular collaborator on the magazine, and together they search font libraries for slightly-off designs to be updated and put to new use. They also develop a corporate text font for the magazine, a new version of Garamond. It’s called Henry, after Henry Tate, the sugar merchant whose donation initiated the founding of the National Gallery of British Art, later re-branded Tate Britain, in 1897.

Upon the birth of his first child, Nico Schweizer leaves his job as art director at the International Design Magazine (I.D.) to spend time with his family in Tuscany. His assistant Kobi Benezri takes over and remains art director until 2007, when he too will have personal reasons to move to the Italian speaking area.

‘Google.com is today’s most powerful net-based search tool. It stands at the beginning of 74% of all visits to the internet.’ This is how an exhibition by REALA and Cornel Windlin at Kulturhuset Stockholm is announced, less than six years after the launch of google.com. The show, called ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’, refers to a button on the Google website that takes users directly to the first ranked page, without offering any search results. REALA and Cornel relate this to the act of browsing and accidentally finding something at a thrift store or flea markets, which is about to disappear in the age of internet shopping. On a trip through the country they collect vintage items from stores and markets, documenting unexpected encounters. (The ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button is later abandoned, as Google realises they are losing potential ad revenue by not guiding the users through the search results page.)

ECAL students Aurèle Sack and Maxime Büchi intern at NORM for a few months. As there are no urgent commissions pending, NORM ask them to draw a font after street signs from Zimbabwe, which had caught the attention of Manuel Krebs while he was on a safari. Memorialising the dark history of the former British colony, which was named after entrepreneur Cecil Rhodes, NORM call the font Rhodesia. They eventually employ it for the corporate identity of Zurich gallerist Nicola von Senger, who has continued to use it ever since.

Kicking off what became almost a decade of prolific design direction and consulting for Tates Modern, Britain and St Ives, James Goggin has to deal with the identity and corporate font created by brand consultants Wolff Olins. James brings in his LL Courier Sans approach of Brutalist typeface adaptation, proposing gradually evolving alternative versions of the official Tate font for individual exhibitions. For Olafur Eliasson’s Turbine Hall show ‘The Weather Project’, James creates a caps-only dot version with Laurenz Brunner, who collaborated on several Tate projects while he studied at Central Saint Martins. The dots are vaguely reminiscent of the punched cover of Marcel Duchamp’s 1934 La boîte verte (La mariée mise á nu par ses célibataires, même), but they also spell out the literal material infrastructure of Eliasson’s project – precipation mist ‘dots’ flooded in yellow mono-frequency light – in a city-wide teaser campaign before the top secret installation was officially revealed to the public.

Jürg Lehni receives a diploma in Interaction Design from ECAL for a thesis work called ‘Hektor’. A stunning vector-drawing robot navigated via the self-developed software Scriptographer (released as a free plug-in for Adobe Illustrator in 2001), Hektor can cover entire walls, and immediately starts traveling to various exhibitions across Europe.

For the fourth summer in a row, Nazareno Crea (*1983) interns at Susanna Cucco, the venerable Milan-based designer with clients such as Jil Sander. He intends to go study graphic design abroad, and someone at the studio suggests he choose ECAL over Central Saint Martins. Nazareno travels to Lausanne to personally hand in his application, and when he tells Pierre Keller about the advice he received in Milan, Pierre is visibly touched.

To complete his design studies, 25-year-old Kobi Benezri switches from Jerusalem’s Bezalel Academy of Art and Design to Cooper Union School of Art in New York. He arrives in a city deeply unsettled after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001. At Cooper Union, his teachers include Nico Schweizer (for Experimental Typography) and Phaidon Art Director Julia Hasting (for Publication Design). Eventually Kobi and Julia become a couple, and Nico takes Kobi along with him when he becomes Art Director at the International Design Magazine (I.D.), in 2003.

At the end of his apprenticeship in Switzerland, 22-year-old Laurenz Brunner is encouraged by one of his tutors to specialise in type design. He moves to London and happens to finds a vacant room in an apartment shared by Laurent Benner and two friends. Through Laurent, Laurenz quickly gets to know the rest of a bunch of recent RCA graduates.

Cornel Windlin takes over responsibility for the identity of Schauspielhaus Zürich under incoming directors Christoph Marthaler and Stephanie Carp. Marthaler, a Swiss stage director educated in Paris, and Carp, a German dramaturge, are known for highly conceptual and aesthetically refined, but also socially critical and weirdly funny productions. Working with his employee Gilles Gavillet, as well as new hire Urs Lehni, Cornel bases the identity on a playful strategy of mashing typefaces, in order to avoid the stiffness of a pre-set logo. After the first season, Cornel, Gilles, and Urs pull out and hand the conceptual approach over to Lex Trüb in the summer of 2001.

Jonathan Hares, Nicole Udry, and Laurent Benner receive their MAs from the Royal College of Art, a year after James Goggin. While James has already founded his studio, Practise, with Shan James, and Nicole goes to work at design agency North, Laurent and Jonathan start to operate in varying constellations, often including Alex Rich, and frequently supported by furniture designer Michael Marriott. Despite the group’s location in London, Nicole’s connections to ECAL and Laurent’s relation with Lineto soon bring all of them to Switzerland on various occasions.

Jürg Lehni, Urs Lehni, and Rafael Koch expand their interactive employment of vector graphics, such as in the online Lego play, with the release of vectorama.org. The website offers a user-friendly playground for the arrangement of various objects.

On a summer trip in London, ECAL director Pierre Keller is introduced to fresh Royal College of Art graduate James Goggin by former ECAL student Nicole Udry, now herself at the RCA. Pierre later calls James at six o’clock one morning and invites him on very short notice to lead a four-week workshop at ECAL. While in Switzerland, James visits Cornel Windlin (at the suggestion of Laurent Benner) and Elektrosmog’s Marco Walser, and he learns that ‘Swiss Design’ looks quite different from what he was taught at school.

Jonas Williamsson and Samuel Nyholm graduate from Sweden’s largest art school, Konstfack, in Stockholm. They transform their Label REALA, developed out of their magazine The Real Art (&Poetry), into an office for graphic design with London-based Laurent Benner, whom Samuel had met during an exchange semester at Central Saint Martins.

A year after graduating from Hochschule für Gestaltung Zurich, Marco Walser and Valentin Hindermann found their studio Elektrosmog. Their interest in creating entire visual environments of vernacular idioms – employing formats such as flyers, posters, signage, publications, as well as merchandise – quickly leaves a distinctive mark on the Zurich cultural scene.

Set up in an abandoned Lucerne building for a couple of months, ‘Transport’ is an off-space for graphic design exhibitions and events, as well as a graduation project at Fachklasse Grafik by twenty-something-year-olds Urs Lehni, Rafael Koch, Peter Körner and Markus Wohlhüter. Urs’s younger brother Jürg joins in, and numerous designs are produced and applied directly on site, such as a series of posters with a font composed of Lego bricks.

On 1 January, two 29-year-old graduates from the Biel/Bienne School of Design in Switzerland, Dimitri Bruni and Manuel Krebs, found their Zurich based studio NORM. The programmatic name announces their intention to reject a number of design strategies omniscient in late 1990s postmodernism, such as anything goes, eclecticism and pastiche. They soon make themselves heard with a manifesto-like publication, Norm: Introduction (1999).

After having read an article about upcoming Zurich designers in an inflight magazine, a Swiss expat from Hoboken, New Jersey, Nico Schweizer, shows up at the doorstep of Cornel Windlin’s studio. He has some drafts and ideas for typefaces in his carry-on luggage, and soon he starts to work with Lineto in a variety of collaborative forms.

A Swiss student from Central Saint Martins in London, Laurent Benner, interns at Cornel Windlin’s in Zurich. The two of them work on a catalog for a show called ‘Nonchalance’ at Centre PasquART in Biel/Bienne. It’s the beginning of an enduring relationship, and over the next couple of years, Laurent, soon to proceed to the Royal College of Art, will play a key role in connecting an international group of designers to Lineto.

After some years on the move, Stephan Müller decides to settle in Berlin. Friends of friends offer him a place to stay and work in an old building at Hackescher Mark, where he encounters curator Ulrike Kremeier. She recommends him to the curators of the upcoming debut Berlin Biennale (1998), Klaus Biesenbach and Hans Ulrich Obrist, and the two ask Stephan to work on a catalog with Paris-based M/M (who, in a strange twist of events, have been recommended to Hans Ulrich by Cornel Windlin). M/M withdraw after they are informed of how little they will earn, and Stephan sets about to realise the concept with the help of two Swiss interns. Once everything is finalised, they put the data on a 44 MB Sciquest disk and drive it across Germany in a rental car to Stuttgart-based printers Hatje Cantz.

The ominously named G1 Trendbuch für Grafik Designers, published in Switzerland by Neville Brody and Lewis Blackwell, features a report about a caps-only font by Cornel Windlin called Mogadishu. It is modelled after a 1977 photo taken by German terrorist group R.A.F. of their hostage Hanns-Martin Schleyer holding a sign with handwritten capital letters spelling ‘SEIT 20 TAGEN GEFANGENER’ (‘prisoner since 20 days’). A former SS officer turned influential leader of the post-war German industry, Schleyer was eventually murdered by R.A.F. Cornel originally drew the font for Fuse 7: Violence, but it was rejected by the editors. In response, Cornel submitted another handwritten font, entirely unrelated, under the same name.

A group of young curators, artists and writers from Vienna launch the independent art magazine springerin. Among them is Martha Stutteregger, a student from the local University of Applied Arts, who works on the design of the magazine. Three years later she will become one of the first collaborators of Lineto.

When Stephan Müller does a stint at a Frankfurt-based advertising agency, he becomes aware that big companies such as Messe Frankfurt are increasingly keen to showcase a website. The main reason for this is the improved surfing experience provided by Mosaic successor Netscape Navigator (1994). While the technical restrictions for the realisation of websites remain severe, ad agencies such as the one in Frankfurt start selling website concepts at extremely high prices.

Escaping a recession with heavy impact on the creative industries in England, Cornel Windlin returns to Switzerland and settles in Zürich. He becomes a strong visual presence in town with a posters series for alternative music venue Rote Fabrik, delivering an entirely new visual language every two weeks or so. After Hans Rudolf Lutz refers Cornel to the head of the Museum for Design in Zurich, Martin Heller, Cornel is invited to design posters for the venerable institution, multiplying his traces on the cityscape.

Neville Brody and editor Jon Wozencroft launch FUSE, an experimental magazine for digital type design released as part of the FontFont library. Each issue presents four experimental typefaces by four designers under a common theme. The disk with the fonts is supplemented with a printed introduction as well as four posters, each showing one of the fonts in use. Invited to contribute to FUSE 3: (Dis)Information, Cornel Windlin – now an independent designer in London – submits Moonbase Alpha, based on an accidental error in printing Akzidenz Grotesk set at 4 point. As Adobe Type Manager wasn’t installed on the Mac, the Stylewriter delivered the extremely pixelated letters, hardly readable, as they were displayed on the screen. Cornel enlarged the prints, modified them to make them readable and fed them back into the Mac, so that disinformation would become information again.

The May issue of The Face features several fonts designed by Cornel Windlin, at the time art editor of the magazine, on the cover and on openers throughout the issue. His ‘Bavaria’ typeface accompanies Juergen Teller’s cover shot of perky Wendy James, singer and eye-catcher of hype-fuelled two-hit-wonder Transvision Vamp. A few weeks later, 27-year old Teller accompanies an obscure band called Nirvana on their small pre-Nevermind tour through Germany. For undisclosed reasons, Kurt Cobain is later spotted sporting a Wendy James T-shirt.

Back at Lucerne School of Art and Design after his internship at Spiekermann (and a second one at Tempo magazine in Hamburg), Stephan Müller tells Hans Rudolf Lutz all he has learned about computers. Lutz thinks they will be of no use in graphic design, but two years later, he buys a computer himself. By then, Stephan already owns one, as his grandmother had urged him to choose between a car and an Apple Macintosh. At the Lucerne school, however, computers are introduced only gradually. After a Linux station for film editing, the first Apple Macintosh is purchased and made available to students from various departments.

Heading from Lucerne School of Art and Design, 24-year-old Stephan Müller arrives in Berlin for a three-month internship at Spiekermann’s in the beginning of November, in the days of historical turmoil. He is overwhelmed by the technical possibilities of digital design, as he encounters the fonts made by Spiekermann’s friends from Califorina, Emigré co-founders Zuzana Licko and Rudy VanderLans. He also gets to know the experimental digital typefaces by Just von Rossum and Erik von Blokland, who are based in Berlin. Among Stephan’s duties at Spiekermann’s is sliding the floppy disks with the fonts sold by FontShop into their cardboard envelopes.

After graduating from Fachklasse Grafik in 1988, Cornel Windlin returns to work for Neville Brody until 1990. Now a few personal computers are in use at the studio, but if you design a print item digitally (back in these days) you are far from done. First, you need to transfer the data onto a floppy disc and send it to a service shop with a printer running on PostScript. There they print the actual data (not what you had seen on the screen) on either paper or film in certain predetermined formats. If it is on paper, you must reproduce it on film in the next step. In any case you must then finally mail the film to your offset printer.

Cornel Windlin interns at Neville Brody’s studio in London, where he finds that no one is working with computers. An adherent of both Dadaism and Pop Art, Brody had made himself a name with a very personal and utterly contemporary design style, manifested in concert posters, album covers, and in his art direction for music and fashion magazine The Face (1981–86).

While studying at Fachklasse Grafik in Lucerne, 22-year-old Cornel Windlin interns at Zurich-based advertising agency Stalder & Suter, a spin-off from Basel’s venerable GGK (co-founded by Karl Gerstner in 1963). Working under Martin Suter – who will later become Switzerland’s most commercially successful novelist – Cornel figures that writers have more influence on shaping a campaign than designers. He goes on to apply for an internship as a writer at an advertising agency in Berne. There he comes across a number of brand-new Apple Macintosh computers, released in 1984. They are sitting around untouched, as no one knows how to operate them. Cornel switches one on and stays for the night, spellbound by MacPaint, MacWrite and MacDraw.