KARL GERSTNER MAPPED THE DESIGN PROCESS INTO AN “ORGANIZED INVENTORY OF POSSIBILITIES,” RECOGNIZING THE POTENTIAL IMPACT OF COMPUTATION UPON GRAPHIC DESIGN.1 He followed intellectually on the heels of Max Bill and Paul Lohse, applying Swiss style concepts at his successful agency Gerstner + Kutter in Basel, Switzerland—founded in 1959 with public relations specialist Markus Kutter—while exploring concrete art in his personal work. He thrived on the intensity of agency life, working for clients such as Geigy, IBM, and Ford. In 1964, the same year that IBM announced its popular mainframe computer System/360, Gerstner wrote Designing Programmes: Instead of Solutions for Problems, Programmes for Solutions. In 1974 he published Compendium for Literates: A System of Writing. Both books use astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky’s morphological method to construct a systematic approach that catalogs all possible variables. As Gerstner explains, “The process of designing is reduced to an act of selection: crossing and linking parameters.”2 The simplicity and order of Swiss style typography, the mathematical precision of concrete art, and an understanding of procedural literacy—Gerstner drew on all these ideas just as mainframe computing began to permeate the larger creative culture.
MORPHOLOGICAL BOX Diagram accompanying “Programme as Logic” in Gerstner’s Designing Programmes. As he explains, “It contains the criteria—the parameters on the left, the relative components on the right—following which marks and signs are to be designed from letters. The criteria are rough. As the work proceeds, of course, they are to be refined as desired.”
KARL GERSTNER | 1964
Is the grid a program? Let me put it more specifically: if the grid is considered as a proportional regulator, a system, it is a program par excellence. Squared paper is an (arithmetic) grid, but not a program. Unlike, say, the (geometric) module of Le Corbusier, that can, of course, be used as a grid but is primarily a program. Albert Einstein said of the module: “It is a scale of proportions that makes the bad difficult and the good easy.” That is a programmatic statement of what I take to be the aim of Designing Programmes.
The typographic grid is a proportional regulator for composition, tables, pictures, etc. It is a formal program to accommodate x unknown items. The difficulty is: to find the balance, the maximum of conformity to a rule with the maximum of freedom. Or: the maximum of constants with the greatest possible variability.
In our agency we have evolved the “mobile grid.” An example is the arrangement on the previous page: the grid for the periodical Capital.
The basic unit is ten points; the size of the basic typeface including the lead. The text and picture area are divided at the same time into one, two, three, four, five, and six columns. There are 58 units along the whole width. This number is a logical one when there are always two units between the columns. That is: it divides in every case without a remainder: with two columns the 58 units are composed of 2 x 28 + 2 (space between columns); with 3 columns 3 x 18 + 2 x 2; with 4 columns 4 x 13 + 3 x 2; with 5 columns 5 x 10 + 4 x 2; with 6 columns 6 x 8 + 5 x 2 10-point units.
The grid looks complicated to anyone not knowing the key. For the initiate it is easy to use and (almost) inexhaustible as a program.
KARL GERSTNER
Review of 5x10 Years of Graphic Design etc. 2001
The illustrations [on the right] show pictures from the series 201. They came into being in 1966 and are the work of Frieder Nake, who is per se a programmer at the computing center of the Stuttgart Institute of Technology.
He writes: “Visual objects generated by computers and drawn by automatic drawing machines are solutions of aesthetic programs that are written by human beings and implemented by machines.
“All elements of the visual are periodic, i.e., capable of being programmed at will.” I was glad to have an opportunity to write a commentary on this theme. The opportunity was offered by the periodical Graphic Design, from which the following extracts are taken. I am, however, replacing the expression “periodic” by “continuous”; it is more apposite and precise.
Numbers are continuous: 1–2–3–4–5–6–7–8–9–10…The step between 1 and 2 is precisely the same size as that between 9 and 10. The steps can be refined ad lib.: 1–1.1–1.2…2 without the step between 1 and 2 being altered. This truism about numbers is also true of colors: colors are of their nature continuous. A series from white to black, e.g., in ten steps, each step the same size as the next and the one preceding it. Here the question is not one of counting but one of measuring. What is measured is the distance between two points. Between white and black there may be ten steps, or two, or two hundred (the human eye cannot distinguish more): a certain gray will always occupy the same place, an exactly intermediate shade of gray will occupy a place exactly in the center between black and white, and so forth.
But not only white will pass over continuously into black but any color into any other color. Colors form a closed system. But not only colors but all the elements of the visual are continuous. Any form can pass over into any other. Any form of movement (a bird’s flight for example) is a process of continuously changing forms, only in this case the change is “fluid.” It is because any movement can be resolved back into single forms = phases that the film is possible: it consists of twenty-four static but continuous single pictures that, when projected, again create the illusion of movement.
I am indebted to Mitsuo Katsui, Tokyo, for an example of a continuous change in the field of elementary geometry: he caused a triangle to merge “imperceptibly” into a circle.
KARL GERSTNER
Compendium for Literates 1974
1 Blurb on the dust jacket of the first edition of Karl Gerstner, Compendium for Literates: A System of Writing (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1974).
2. Quoted by Manfred Kroplien in his foreword to Karl Gerstner, Review of 5x10 Years of Graphic Design etc. (Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2001).
