RASTER

A small history of graphic design, 1945–2026 — read as a working designer reads it: composition, colour, type, message, and what would kill the work.

40 designers · 344 works · 136 principles · translated 100%

1945

Alexey Brodovitch

1898–1971

Editorial art direction, the spread as unit, white space

Lester Beall

1903–1969

American modernism, public poster, corporate identity as a system

Herbert Matter

1907–1984

Photomontage, photography as typography, identity through light

Cipe Pineles

1908–1991

Editorial design, commissioning illustration

Bradbury Thompson

1911–1995

Typographic experiment, the craft of printing

Giovanni Pintori

1912–1999

Corporate abstraction, Italian modernism

Paul Rand

1914–1996

Corporate modernism, wit

Alvin Lustig

1915–1955

Book covers, mark instead of illustration, design across media

Max Huber

1919–1992

Swiss rigour × Milanese noise; overprint

1955

Emil Ruder

1914–1970

Typography as system and rhythm

Josef Müller-Brockmann

1914–1996

Swiss International Style, grid systems, concert poster

Henryk Tomaszewski

1914–2005

Polish poster school — hand-drawn wit

Saul Bass

1920–1996

film titles and corporate marks

Armin Hofmann

1920–2020

Basel School, pedagogy of form, poster in black and white

Reid Miles

1927–1993

Record covers, typographic jazz

Adrian Frutiger

1928–2015

design of typeface families and signage systems

Karl Gerstner

1930–2017

Programmatic and parametric design

1965

Herb Lubalin

1918–1981

letter as image — type pushed, overlapped and cut until it becomes content

Corita Kent (Sister Mary Corita)

1918–1986

screenprint, pop-vernacular, protest — an advertising slogan read sincerely

Otl Aicher

1922–1991

Systemic design, pictograms

Muriel Cooper

1925–1994

book as system → typography without paper (depth, transparency, movement)

Wim Crouwel

1928–2019

systemic typography brought to a polemic against itself

Milton Glaser

1929–2020

eclecticism — history as building material, not as reference

Roman Cieślewicz

1930–1996

photomontage, enlarged halftone, mirroring — the image as an attack on the image

Massimo Vignelli

1931–2014

system as a service to the reader — one typeface, grid, manual, word instead of mark

Tadanori Yokoo

1936–

Psychedelic collage, Japanese pop, clash of registers without hierarchy

Emory Douglas

1943–

movement graphics — the newspaper as poster, drawing that imitates woodcut, photomontage

Chermayeff & Geismar (Ivan Chermayeff, Tom Geismar)

Chermayeff 1932–2017 · Geismar 1931– · studio od 1957

Abstract corporate mark and identity as programme; poster as a single found object

1975

Ikko Tanaka (田中一光)

1930–2002

Japanese tradition (Rinpa, ukiyo-e, Noh, Kabuki) translated into flat geometry and grid; face as sign; Muji — identity without identity

Shigeo Fukuda (福田繁雄)

1932–2009

visual paradox — figure/ground, impossible object, object turned against its own function; one image, one word, flat black

Wolfgang Weingart

1941–2021

„New Wave" typography — the Swiss system dismantled from within, with Swiss discipline

Jamie Reid

1947–2023

punk, situationist détournement, cheap agit-prop graphics

Peter Saville

1955–

appropriation, record sleeves, subtraction as authorship

1985

Barbara Kruger

1945–

found photograph + one sentence in a label — an advertisement that speaks against advertising

April Greiman

1948–

hybrid image — video, bitmap, photography and typeface in one space; first serious Macintosh

Neville Brody

1957–

editorial typography — a typeface drawn for a single job, identity as behaviour instead of a mark

1995

Paula Scher

1948–

typography as image — wood type, extreme scale, identity as behaviour

David Carson

1954/1955–

intuitive layout, type against the tonal masses of photography, degradation as shared surface

Irma Boom

1960–

the book as object — block, edge, thickness, and the production process carry the content

Stefan Sagmeister

1962–

the making process is the message — text cut, written, built and photographed