Wolfgang Weingart

Wolfgang Weingart is one of the most praised and most influential artists, around the world for his expressive typographic explorations. He was an exceptional teacher and throughout his career, for forty years, he travelled almost all around the Earth to share his creativeness with others.

His style maneuvered away entirely from the traditional Swiss Design and instead followed a different approach to design, which led to him becoming the ‘father’ of a new style – New Wave. During his lectures he was surrounded by students with different characteristics, his time with them helped inspire his experimentations

• He was influenced by Emil Ruder however discarded the typography and Armin Hoffman

• he wished provoke this dull art and expand the type’s capabilities such as size, weight and legibility, to verify that typography can also be art, not just a means of information.

• He incorporated patterns, geometric shapes and the sans serif typeface

• He approved of collage and made of use of overlayering images which were taken from films and placed in his designs

• He made use of half tone and moire designs, mostly in black and white

• He altered his typesetters to not be constrained or limited to one form design, but to change and explore with the spacing between letters and images.

One of Weingart’s students was April Greimain who was fortunate enough to be introduced to the digital age. She has travelled to Los Angeles which lacked aesthetic inspiration. Although it was almost completely barren from any form of design, this gave her clean slate of rediscovering other methods of communication in design.

Many designers were hesitant and unconvinced of applying computer into design. Most were worried that traditional drawing would be substituted for computer design and thus completely forgotten. Others like Greiman saw a promising future for this and she easily adapted to this medium since she had always been a fan of technology. She was one of the first to embrace computer technology as a design tool.

Her style consists of collage and layers in her text and images with an almost aerial essence.

All I can say is that, I appreciate the fact that he shared his ideas with many students and has helped many to develop their skills and at the same time challenging himself by listening and gaining ideas from their styles. He opened up many opportunities for style and even though it was orderly it still had a sense of movement.