Zimmermann Asociados

Published in Spanish in Arte¿?Diseño, Gustavo Gili Publisher, 2004

1.
Art manifests itself in different ways through human oeuvres, singularly through music, poetry, sculpture, painting, etc. Each one of these different art forms need the intervention of the human being in order to manifest itself. For example, for music to become manifest it needs a composer to write it, an interpreter to play or a singer who gives it the voice. And so with the other arts. The art of painting needs a painter or an illustrator to make present in the form of a visual representation on the canvas or paper, an objective and existing reality, or, in the case of non-figurative painting of the 20th century, new figures or forms not necessarily subject to objective criteria.

Continue reading >

It’s possible that the name of the German designer Otl Aicher may be familiar to some elderly designers, but it is equally possible that it is not familiar and is not meaningful to younger generations of designers. Even those who can locate his name in the “who is who” in the European design panorama, don’t know more than what is known by the general public, that is, that he was one of the important personalities, together with Max Bill, Tomás Maldonado and others, who founded the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm (1953-1968); others may recall him as the designer of the corporate image for the Olympic Games of Munich (1972) for which he also designed the famous pictogram system.

Continue reading >

At the time of this writing, seven years have have passed since the citizens of Europe had to abandon their respective currencies – the Francs, the Liras, the Marks, the Pesetas etc., and get accustomed to the use of the new currency, the Euro.

In order to introduce a common currency to all the countries pertaining to the European Union, on February 1996 the European Monetary Institute (EMI), predecessor of the Central European Bank, presented a competition for the design of the new banknotes. Not everybody could participate. Only members countries of the European Union had the authority to invite in each case three designers, the great majority of which had never designed banknotes in their professional life.

Continue reading >

The first time I heard Adrian Frutiger’s name was from my teacher, Emil Ruder, the professor of typography at what was then known as the Basel School of Arts and Trades. One day in the mid 1950s, during my studies, he showed me and commented on the first proofs of the Univers program of Adrian Frutiger. I recall how he pointed out that the endings of the strokes of the letters a, c, e and s, ended horizontally and not diagionally as in the case of Akzidenz-Grotesk, a formal feature that was, in fact, introduced in the later design of the Haas-Grotesk. Emil Ruder was also the first person to make the Univers program known and in a series of magnificent typographic compositions for the covers of the Typographische Monatsblätter magazine, he demonstrated the wealth of rich and novel solutions that could be achieved by combining different Univers fonts.

Continue reading >