Karl Gerstner

1. What it is — a poster for the Liberal (Freisinnig-Democratic) Party in Basel, offset lithograph, MoMA (object 50.1960, gift of the artist).
2. Composition — an orange surface almost entirely filled with a large, abstracted photographic form (a posterised/solarised photograph, probably a human figure or part of a body — the exact motif is not confirmed, to verify against the image); the text "auch Du bist liberal" small, along the upper edge to the right, entirely subordinate to the image.
3. Colour — only two tones: orange background and a dark chestnut-maroon for the abstracted form; no black, no grey, no third colour.
4. Typography — an ordinary grotesque (sans serif), lowercase, with not a single enlarged headline — the whole hierarchy runs through the image, not through the text.
5. Message — the three-second test: a warm, soft, almost organic shape without a single conventional sign of a political poster (no candidate's face, no party symbol, no red-white-blue palette). The five-metre test: it remains a pure orange field with a dark shape — it works as colour/signal too.
6. Why exactly this way — it deliberately avoids every convention of the 1959 political poster by using an industrial process (posterisation through photolithography) to turn a photograph into a warm, personal, almost abstract sign — consistent with the message "you too are liberal", which wants to make liberalism personal, not institutional.
7. What would kill it — adding a party symbol or a candidate's face — would instantly pull the poster back into convention and destroy the whole gesture of abstraction.

Principles: poruka-i-forma-jedno To verify against the image: the exact motif of the photograph that was posterised.

1. What it is — a poster for the daily newspaper National-Zeitung, photolithograph, 127 × 88.9 cm, MoMA (object 270.1965).
2. Composition — a photograph of a classic twin-bell alarm clock across the whole surface on a black background; the two texts are NOT set horizontally but follow the shape of the photographed object — "gegen Siebenschläfer" runs winding over the arc of the bell, upper left–right, "National Zeitung" follows the circle of the dial at the bottom centre.
3. Colour — entirely black-and-white: black background, chrome-grey/silver photograph of the clock, not a single added colour.
4. Typography — an ordinary grotesque (sans serif), but set on a curved path that exactly follows the geometry of the photographed object, not a straight baseline.
5. Message — the German idiom "gegen Siebenschläfer" (against oversleeping/ "dormice") + the name of the paper = read the news, don't sleep through the morning. The three-second test: the image of the clock alone carries the message "time/wake up" even without reading the text.
6. Why exactly this way — this is the physical definition of "integral typography", the term coined the same year with Ruder: the text is not a caption over the image but takes the shape of the photograph itself, so the image and text become one and the same drawing.
7. What would kill it — setting any lettering on a straight horizontal line — the poster would become an ordinary captioned photograph instead of one fused sign.

Principles: poruka-i-forma-jedno, tipografija-prati-fotografski-oblik (local tag)

1. What it is — a poster for the Braun SM3 shaver, offset lithograph, diptych (a+b), printer Wassermann A.G. Basel, whole 167.6 × 118.7 cm, MoMA (object 529.1990.a-b).
2. Composition — panel a: turquoise background, the title set in a narrow, almost square column across the upper half, the appliance photographed and cropped at the bottom of the frame as if emerging from the text below. Panel b (announced through a thumbnail, not seen at full resolution — probably a close-up of a face).
3. Colour — a single flat turquoise background + orange-red text over it, the product photograph in natural chrome/grey tones.
4. Typography — a humanist grotesque (sans serif), centred, set at a narrow measure so the title itself becomes an almost geometric block, not a line for reading.
5. Message — a play on words: "ins Gesicht geschrieben" (literally "written into the face") is at once an idiom and a literal description of what the shaver does to the face. The three-second test: the colour + the product silhouette immediately signal "shaving ad".
6. Why exactly this way — this is the purest applied proof of integral typography theory: the phrase is chosen because it's simultaneously an idiom about the face AND a literal description of the product's action on the face — message and form are one and the same statement, not text describing an image.
7. What would kill it — replacing the play-on-words headline with ordinary ad copy ("new Braun SM3") while keeping the same layout and colour — the whole theoretical point (integral typography) would vanish, leaving an ordinary ad of the period.

Principles: poruka-i-forma-jedno To verify against the image: the content of panel b (probably a face); the exact typeface/cut.

1. What it is — cover of Markus Kutter's experimental novel, publisher Arthur Niggli Verlag, 1957; object L-GERS-2 in the collection of the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich.
2. Composition — all four words of the title take up almost the entire cover, each word as a separate large block of capitals, each block rotated at a different angle so the words fit together like tilted plates, rather than reading as a calm horizontal title; author/publisher information reduced to a thin strip of small text.
3. Colour — warm cream/sand ground, only black for text — no image, no illustration for the whole novel.
4. Typography — Akzidenz Grotesk bold (documented), letters run off/bleed over the top and bottom edge of the cover, each word on its own baseline within a hidden grid.
5. Message — for an "experimental novel" about a boat journey, the cover typographically performs instability/movement (tilted, cropped, large letters) instead of depicting a boat. Three-second test: first you see an abstract typographic composition, only then the title.
6. Why exactly this way — "integral typography" applied to publishing: the publisher (Arthur Niggli, who a decade later would also print Ruder's Typographie) gets a cover whose typographic structure literally performs the disorientation Kutter's prose is about.
7. What would kill it — aligning all four words to the same horizontal baseline — a calm, stable result would contradict a novel about crossing the sea.

Principles: poruka-i-forma-jedno

1. What it is — book cover, 1968 edition (Arthur Niggli Ltd.), a copy from Harald Geisler's library.
2. Composition — the cover functions as title page and table of contents simultaneously; at the top the author's name and main title in large letters; the middle in small letters lists six abstract categories ("Programme as morphology / logic / grid / photography / literature / music"); below, larger, four more concrete categories ("Programme as typeface / typography / picture / method") — no image, no ornament, hierarchy built purely from three type sizes.
3. Colour — a single dark green on natural cream paper, no black.
4. Typography — a plain grotesque (sans serif), three clear size steps carry the entire information hierarchy, left alignment with a ragged right edge.
5. Message — the cover doesn't advertise the book with an image or slogan but reveals its actual argument (design is a programme with these named categories) before the book is opened. Three-second test: it reads as a contents list/manifesto, not as a cover.
6. Why exactly this way — consistent with his own thesis: a cover that SHOWS the programme instead of illustrating a "big idea" with an image is a book that performs its own argument on its own cover.
7. What would kill it — adding a striking image or one punchy slogan — the revealed content would turn back into an ordinary book advertisement.

Principles: program-umjesto-artefakta

1. What it is — his own typeface, published by Berthold for Diatype; the specimen in the image is a modern digital restoration (Stephan Müller, Forgotten Shapes, 2018), not a photograph of the original catalogue.
2. Composition — not applicable in the usual sense; the subject of analysis is the letterforms, not the layout of the modern specimen sheet.
3. Colour — not applicable to the original (the modern specimen uses green/ black/gold for legibility; the metal/phototype original would have been black on white — to verify against the image if an original Berthold catalogue is found.
4. Typography — a geometric grotesque with unusually wide spacing and rounded terminals; the lowercase "a" is SINGLE-STOREY (bowl and stem, not double-storey as in Akzidenz/Univers/Helvetica) — a strikingly different choice for a Basel designer of that moment, when all his peers worked with a double-storey "a". Typeface: Gerstner-Programm (documented).
5. Message — the typeface itself is a "programme": designed as parametrically generated variants (from thin to bold, from narrow to wide) from a single base formula — the typeface is theory turned into letters.
6. Why exactly this way — the single-storey "a" and wide spacing deliberately break with the Akzidenz-Grotesk/Univers norm that every other Basel designer in this project uses without question — here Gerstner does not reproduce his teachers' typeface but builds his own from scratch.
7. What would kill it — (not applicable to an individual work) — imposing a double-storey "a" would erase the only truly original formal decision in the whole typeface design.

Principles: program-umjesto-artefakta To verify against the image: the appearance of the original Berthold Diatype catalogue (the specimen here is a modern reconstruction, not to be confused with the archival original).

1. What it is — grid diagram for Capital magazine; the image is a modern visualisation (Manuel Schmalstieg, 2018) made after the reproduction in Designing Programmes (1964), not a photograph of the original drawing.
2. Composition — the grid is divided into 58 individually addressable modules by an irregular but rule-governed lattice of verticals/horizontals — not into equal columns — so that from the same number of units hundreds of different valid layouts can be assembled.
3. Colour — the modern reconstruction uses pastel colours by module family purely for the legibility of the diagram — not part of the original appearance of the grid.
4. Typography — not applicable (grid diagram, no letters).
5. Message — the diagram itself embodies "design a programme, not a solution": instead of drawing a fixed magazine layout, Gerstner built a RULE that generates hundreds of valid layouts for Capital's changing content.
6. Why exactly this way — 58 modules (not a round number like 12 or 24) means the grid was derived backwards from actual content needs (column widths, image sizes Capital needed), not from an abstract ideal — a different logic from Müller-Brockmann's cleaner modular grids.
7. What would kill it — rounding the grid to a "nice" number like 60 would make it easier to explain, but would throw away the exact fit to content that was the whole point.

Principles: program-umjesto-artefakta, morfoloska-kutija To verify against the image: the appearance of the original drawing in the book (this is a modern reconstruction of the diagram, not a photograph of the original).

1. What it is — poster for his own exhibition "Opjekte" (a play on "Objekte"), (op) art galerie, Esslingen, 11.3.–7.4.1966, photolithograph, 85.8 × 58.7 cm, MoMA (object 337.1966, gift of the artist).
2. Composition — a black ground almost entirely filled with a huge abstract white form in a coarse halftone/dot pattern (an enlarged graphic reproduction of an object to the point of unrecognisability); exhibition information (gallery, dates, opening hours) small in the upper third in two blocks; the author's name and exhibition title small, right of centre, over a darker part of the image.
3. Colour — pure black and white, no grey as a flat colour — all value comes from dot density in the halftone, not from mixed ink.
4. Typography — small plain grotesque (sans serif) in lowercase throughout the poster, without a single large size — the author's name is the same size as the gallery's opening hours.
5. Message — a poster for an EXHIBITION OF ONE'S OWN OBJECTS doesn't show the object but performs the same perceptual game (a recognisable image built entirely from a coarse halftone dot) that the exhibited works themselves supposedly perform.
6. Why exactly this way — for a designer whose whole theory is "the programme generates the form", announcing the exhibition with a poster where the FORM is the programme itself (a mechanical halftone rule, pushed to a coarse extreme until the photograph almost falls apart) is the most direct possible self-portrait.
7. What would kill it — returning the dot size to the usual fineness of newspaper halftone — the image would become "just a photograph" again and the whole point (the halftone as visible structure) would vanish. This is almost literally what this RASTER project's aesthetic does with its dither.

Principles: program-umjesto-artefakta, citljivost-na-granici (extended from letters to photography) To verify against the image: the exact object visible through the halftone (an exhibited object?).