I don’t know if that phrase is credited to anyone in particular, but it may as well be to one of the Swiss designer demi-gods, Josef Müller Brockmann. He used understood visual hierarchy, grid-based layout, negative space, and the beauty of the Helvetica typeface. Here are some examples of his posters.
Easy, right? Anyone can design like the Swiss. I’m finding that it’s mostly a question of not trying too hard! In Typography this week, we used his examples to learn about visual hierarchy – what information looks most important on a page, next most important, etc.
In the first exercise, we were given a piece of text and required to create nine different compositions with it. Each composition had specific rules about what we could and couldn’t do, becoming progressively more open.
Then from these sketches, I created a final design to turn in.
