Wolfgang Weingart

Paradis, L. (2011) Wolfgang Weingart. Typographische Monatsblätter (TM)  [Online], January. Available from: <http://www.tm-research-archive.ch/interviews/wolfgang-weingart/> [Accessed 15 December 2013].



Wolfgang Weingart was also interview for the Typographische Monatsblätter, and is an online article now, found here.

LP   During that period, the professions of typographer and graphic designer were two separate entities. I mean, they were obviously linked, but still different jobs.

WW   A graphic designer is a graphic designer, and a typographer is a typographer.

LP   But at some point those disciplines started to merge, right?

WW   Hmm no. Ruder was a very strict typographer. He didn’t like that a typographer made graphic design. He was very stubborn. Hofmann didn’t care, but Ruder was not really happy with a typographer making graphic design. Ruder made pure typography and passed that on to his students. It had nothing to do with graphic design, that is clear. This was also the time when Univers came onto the market and opened a lot of possibilities. It was the big time of Ruder. There was Ruder-type experimentation, which for me is wallpaper typography. Repetition typography, for me, is not typography. In the beginning maybe repetition typography looked new, looked strange, but if you see it too much, it is boring.

- Weingart talks about significant modernist designers, wether typographers or graphic designers, they had opposing opinions on confinements and restrictions in definition of trade. Postmodern designers may wish to obscure this preconceived idea of staying within confines of a practice that may have been specifically studied.

LP   Do you define yourself as a typographer or a graphic designer?

WW   Oh nothing. I am kind of an artist. You probably know my book. I did woodcuts and linoleum cuts. They are very artistic.

- Weingart interestingly considered himself an artist more than a designer, though he is known as a graphic designer with a strong interest in typography...wether his statement is meant to feel sarcastic is unknown, however by observing Weingart as an artist rather than a design, this may explain why some of his work is illegible and outside of modernist conventions at the time. Weingart's work did not aim to be functional, but rather more aesthetic, style over substance.

LP   Do you think you contributed to the merging of the two professions?

WW   I don’t think about it. No typographer was doing the kind of work I was doing; it is closer to art. When I took the direction I did when I was 15 … I didn’t know what I wanted to do, I was inspired by artists like Kirchner and the Die Brücke … I always had an internal fight about what to do in the future. Then I became very enthusiastic about Swiss typography, as you can read in my book. I did a piece for my examination in Germany in 1963. I almost didn’t pass it.

LP   How come?

WW   I grew up with a very classical kind of typography. The examiners lived in this kind of world.

- Weingart puts across a negative view of regulation in regards to the types of people that would disregard his more conceptual design/art work. He makes a reference to his incredulity towards modernist ideals.

LP   So Swiss typography at that time was not very well known?

WW   Only to insiders. In Germany in general it wasn’t. In the beginning of the 60s, it was almost unknown. The Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm existed; it started in 1953 but its work was unknown and strange for Germany. Germany had had the Second World War, it got bombed, it lived in this old world.

LP   Yes. You made a huge contribution to typography and graphic design. I think your work made every designer look at typography differently; even people who didn’t appreciate it.

WW   There were a lot of people against it at the beginning. But slowly they saw the value. Gottschalk and all those people were against it. But in the end they hired some people from Basel. Because they saw they had no other choice—they had to change something. How much? That’s another question. But they had to change something.

- Does this mean that design education must allow for individual interpretation, as it meant in this circumstance? Postmodernism could also mean individual interpretation and room for experimentation, wether this had content or context behind it.

LP   There was a lot of change in technology. You started with lead type and then you saw the computer invasion. Did those changes affect your design?

WW   No. Some teacher in Düsseldorf said that I was the first Photoshop pioneer, and he was not wrong. What you can do now with Photoshop very easily, I did it with film. So the computer brought nothing new for me. I thought I could make different things with the computer, but it was only wishful thinking. For me, manual use, manual results matter much more than pushing buttons. But you cannot be against computers, because they are as necessary as food today.

- Weingart used his instinct to create his work, and as he layered images and type onto film, then producing it to create an abstract effect, so the same process was duplicated with Photoshop, and so if only a longer process, Weingart preferred a manual way of working as he had started out with in the first place. As the generation of young designers today have probably grown up with computer technology, so they regard it as second nature. Utilising computer technology to create designs, in an efficient way.

LP   But the change from lead type to phototypesetting seems to have affected you, right?

WW   That is another thing. Photocomposing and computer composing are a totally different thing. Photocomposing was over film. There were the negative plates of the alphabet, then you made the text step by step, and if you made a mistake you had to start another film. I never worked with photocomposing machines, but I worked with lithography film materials. I used the stet camera, repro camera. I have some examples here. I got new results through transparency. Transparency was my great chance. It is the same principle with the computer: you have the layers.

LP   Other than technical changes, I think there were changes in the way of thinking, in the ideas that were developed, during the period we’re discussing, in graphic design and typography.

WW   You mean the visual changes?

LP   The visual changed but also the ideas presented. For example, there is a series made by Hans-Rudolf Lutz during that time—the series of pastiche covers he made for TM. They brought the idea of contextuality, which was totally new for Switzerland.

- When Weingart replies to the question about visual change he refers to a series of magazine cover designs, that use pastiche as the driving concept to initialise this 'change'. It references technological change, and does not necessarily display progress, just change in itself.