Max Bill: Typography. Advertising. Book Design
This book provides a comprehensive insight into an area of Max Bill's work that has received little attention to date: his typographic work, advertising, and book designs. Although Max Bill preferred to see himself as an architect throughout his life, his earliest works are predominantly in the field of commercial graphics and represent a significant portion of his artistic oeuvre. This publication illustrates that almost all of the lifestyle and housing reforms implemented by the Swiss avant-garde around 1930 were visualized for the public in the "bill-zürich reklame" studio. This monopoly of a graphic artist, unique compared to other European centers, lends Bill's commercial graphic works, published here comprehensively for the first time, a high documentary value.
Max Bill can be discovered as a tireless designer of idiosyncratic typefaces and company logos, as well as a designer with a keen sense of visual wit—a rare trait in constructive design in this country. Bill pursued two opposing principles in his typeface inventions, thus leaving two strands in his work: one graphic and one sculptural. Based on Herbert Bayer's universal typeface, he developed two letterings for the Neubühl housing estate and the "wohnbedarf" company that deviated from all forms known at the time. The reason for the wide "o" may have been the possibility of viewing from the side, but behind it lie formal ideas and the reductionist concept of the Bauhaus.
