Born in 1914, Müller-Brockmann.Josef Müller-Brockmann (May 9th, 1914 – August 30th, 1996) grew up in Rapperswil, Switzerland. Is considered one of the key players in the Swiss School of international Style. When one considers the time of his career, which included the Second World War, the Cold War and the growing influence of Europe on the mend from destruction and fear, he certainly influenced not only a design style that influenced designers on a global scale. It was a time of rebirth for many nations that lay in ruins, rebuilding and rethinking centuries of tradition that were forced to change due to the brutality of war and cruelty. He began his career as an apprentice to the designer and advertising consultant Walter Diggelman before, in 1936, establishing his own Zurich studio specialising in graphics, exhibition design and photography. In 1934, he opened his graphic design and illustration studio in Zurich, first as a freelancer, then joined by collaborators from 1936. In 1937, he became a member of the Swiss Werkbund (Swiss Association of Artists and Designers). By the 1950s he was established as the leading practitioner and theorist of Swiss Style, which sought a universal graphic expression through a grid-based design purged of extraneous illustration and subjective feeling. His ‘Musica viva’ poster series for the Zurich Tonhalle drew on the language of Constructivism to create a visual correlative to the structural harmonies of the music. Müller-Brockmann was founder and, from 1958 to 1965, co-editor of the trilingual journal Neue Grafik (New Graphic Design) which spread the principles of Swiss Design internationally. He was professor of graphic design at the Kunstgewerbeschule, Zurich from 1957 to 1960, and guest lecturer at the University of Osaka from 1961 and the Hochschule fur Gestaltung, Ulm from 1963. From 1967 he was European design consultant for IBM. He is the author of The Graphic Artist and his Design Problems (1961), History of Visual Communication (1971), History of the Poster (with Shizuko Müller-Yoshikawa, 1971) and Grid Systems in Graphic Design (1981). He has contributed to many symposiums and has held one-man exhibitions in Zurich, Bern, Hamburg, Munich, Stuttgart, Berlin, Paris, New York, Chicago, Tokyo, Osaka, Caracas and Zagreb. In 1987 he was awarded a gold medal for his cultural contribution by the State of Zurich.
Müller-Brockmann’s love of structure possibly steamed from several important facets of his life. As early as in middle school, Müller-Brockmann was showing signs of extreme intelligence. Not only was he studious and responsible, but his teachers noticed extreme talent in the areas of geometry and drawing.Despite leaving education at an early age, Müller-Brockmann’s tenacity for learning and art did not falter at all, and on the contrary, grew as he continued to age. After leaving school, Müller-Brockmann began working for Alex Walter Diggelmann, who, only 29 at the time, owned a small studio that had an impressive clientele in Zürich. During his time at this apprenticeship, Müller-Brockmann learned much about typography and graphics. A key principle of Müller-Brockmann’s that developed at this time was his appreciation for determining the quality of letterforms based on the needs, subject, and period of the pieces. Heavily inspired by Paul Renner, Müller-Brockmann discovered his talent for creating work that was both minimalistic and free of ornamentation, yet extremely clear and understandable. From 1967, he was a consultant for IBM and founded the communication agency Muller-Brockmann & Co. Throughout his career, his work was rewarded with numerous prizes. He died on 30 August 1996 in Zurich.
