Thursday, April 4, 2024

the "standard" elegance of Ladislav Sutnar (1930s-1950s)


Ladislav Sutnar became one of the leading graphic design forces of the 1940s-1950s. His style has an avant-garde flavor and dynamism without hindering accessibility. His basic structure is rational: juxtapositions where scale and color become curiously abstract.
Sutnar used geometric forms to build signs that would attract and guide the eye from one level of information to the next. Repeating symbols and forms helped him express an industrial sensibility.


For magazines he developed strict, though mutable, typographic grids, framing sans-serif modern typefaces with white space in a way that prefigured the precise, architectonic compositions of post-war Swiss design. Sutnar was a constructivist in the purest sense.


much later, an elagant designer in the new international swiss typography (more of this in a couple of classes)