The Post Modern Poster

Explore our world-leading Post Modern collection.

The International Style began to lose its energy in the '70s and early '80s. Many criticized it for being cold, formal and dogmatic. A young teacher in Basel named Wolfgang Weingart pushed beyond its boundaries and ushered in today's predominant graphic style loosely known as Post-Modern design.

Weingart experimented with the offset printing process to produce posters that appeared complex and chaotic, playful and spontaneous -- all in stark contrast to his elders' dictates. Weingart's liberation of typography was an important foundation for several new styles, from Memphis and Retro, to the advances now being made in computer graphics around the globe.

Another Post-Modern direction was taken by the Zurich design team of Siegfried Odermatt and Rosmarie Tissi. Less revolutionary in spirit than Weingart, they chose to bend rules rather than break them. More intuitive and playful than their predecessors, they developed unique typographic and spatial solutions which enriched the vocabulary of the International Typographic Style. This approach is most ably seen today in the classically elegant work of Bruno Monguzzi.

A final direction of Post-Modern design in Switzerland followed a path paved by American and German illustrators. The work of Paul Brühwiler for the Filmpodium film festival in Zurich is more closely aligned to the conceptual imagery and aggressiveness of Germany's Gunter Rambow than other Swiss designers. Niklaus Troxler, creator of the Willisau Jazz Festival and its promotional posters, delights in visual puns reminiscent of Milton Glaser.

Other leading designers working in the Post-Modern idiom are Ralph Schraivogel of Zurich, whose ingenious work reveals a richness of texture and image evocative of Weingart, and Werner Jeker of Lausanne, who combines German-style illustration with tight Swiss graphics.

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Switzerland
United States
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Browse by DECADE:

1970s

1980s
1990s
2000s

Browse by SUBJECT:

Music
Exhibitions
Fashion
Filmpodium

Leading Artists:

Bill, Bruhwiler, Coigny, Geissbuhler, Jeker, Kuhn-Klein, Monguzzi, Odermatt, Pfeiffer, Rand, Scher, Schraivogel, Tissi, Troxler, and Weingart