There’s no place like Zürich, for design.
I love this city. Everywhere you look, your eyes will find harmony, so easily. From architecture, to infrastructure, to the way nature mingles with the urban surroundings. I’ve walked for hours and hours, through this city and I’ve never experienced fatigue or other type of visual or auditive stress. For many people, Zürich might be boring, but for me, it was actually, a visually exciting experience.
There’s no wonder this city looks so good. It’s the hometown of Max Miedinger, owner and founder of the Haas Type Foundry, the birthplace of Helvetica. I guess, people do give a damn about the value of design here, people are educated enough to cherish the tremendous value graphic design brings, in all of it´s forms, from poster design and advertising, to typography design and signalectic.
I’ve visited the Museum of Gestaltung and the Kunsthaus, two institutions containing an impressive and extremely valuable collection of art and design. Legendary works of both art and design, from huge names like Salvador Dali, Roy Lichtenstein, Le Corbusier and Giacometti, can be seen here, in brilliantly conceived spaces. I need another life to detail the things I’ve seen there. The experience was overwhelming. This might be a future blog post, perhaps, but now let’s get back to detailing the urban experience I had in Zürich.
Even dough this city is the hometown of another great personality from the art world, HR Geiger, the father of biomechanic surrealism and of Alien, this city is in my opinion, an utopia, a citadelle uniting the modern with the traditional, in an enchanting symbiosis. The urban modern side of Zürich has a strong visual imprint belonging to Max Bill, “a Swiss, modern, Leonardo da Vinci”.
All over the place, if you look at billboards, flyers, posters, you’ll see great examples of refinement in graphic design, clean good logos with sharp well-built typography, high quality fonts, beautifully designed posters, the art of visual merchandising is taken here, to a stellar level and the brands have an urban manifestation of high sophistication.
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