Karl Gerstner Livres

Karl Gerstner is one of the foremost Swiss graphic designers. After withdrawing from active agency work, Gerstner designed the corporate identities for such companies as Swissair and worked as a worldwide identity consultant and designer for IBM.

Karl Gerstner’s work is a milestone in the history of design. One of his most important works is Designing Programmes, which is presented here in a new edition of the original 1964 publication. In four essays, the author provides a basic introduction to his design methodology. Instead of set recipes, the method suggests a model for design in the early days of the computer era. The intellectual models it proposes, however, continue to be useful today. What it does not purvey is cut-and-dried, true-or-false solutions or absolutes of any kind - instead, it develops fundamental principles in an innovative and future-oriented way. The book is especially topical and exciting in the context of current developments in computational design, which seem to hold out the possibility of programmed design. With many examples from the worlds of graphic and product design, music, architecture, and art, it inspires the reader to seize on the material, develop it further, and integrate it into his or her own work.

As a visual designer, Karl Gerstner led the double life of a graphic designer who worked on commission and an artist who worked according to his own directives. In the realm of the constructive, Gerstner's work is quite unique. He never composed pictures in the usual sense but rather made them as algorithms, i.e. through operations that generated endless possibilities. In each chapter of Review of Seven Chapters of Constructive Pictures, etc. , Gerstner describes how he "found" a selection of individual pictures. The selected works span 50 years, from his early "serial pictures" of the 50s through participation objects which include the viewer as a co-designer, the "color forms" created on the basis of a color-and-form model developed by Gerstner, and his most recent production, in which he transfers the basic principles of fractal geometry to pictures.

The oeuvre Duchamp left us is small and repeatedly subject to multiple interpretations of the art historical, psychological, socio-critical and alchemical persuasion. And yet, how Duchamp's last painting, Tu m' from 1918, has never drawn extensive attention among his exegetes. The title itself poses a Does it mean "tu m'aimes" (you love me), "tu m'emb'tes" (you bore me) or "tu m'emmerdes" (you can kiss my ass)? Karl Gerstner, a prominent Swiss graphic designer who knew Duchamp personally, was taken aback the first time he saw Tu m' , but also intrigued. Having acquired a reproduction of the picture, Gerstner proceeded to penetrate its meanings and surfaces more and more deeply; as his surprise faded, his fascination grew. Enter this book, encouraged by artist Richard Hamilton (perhaps the most intimate of Duchamp connoisseurs), and its 20 analytical essays of riddle-solving.

Swiss designer and artist Gerstner had a significant influence on typography and the history and development of postwar graphic design. This volume is one of his most important and influential works, in which Gerstner provides a basic introduction to his design methodology and suggests a model for design in the early days of the computer era.