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In the 1920s, members of the avant-garde sought to replace past styles with new forms that reflected the emerging mechanics of motion pictures and the mass media. Many designers today embrace the modernist ambition to create an experimental visual language that hinges on technology and turns against the past. These same designers, however, have rejected the ideal of a purified, objective, and universal mode of communication articulated by avant-garde designers and typographers in the 20s. In its place, they have promoted personal expression and a vocabulary that mixes modernist geometries with references to popular culture.
Constructivist designers working in the Soviet Union, Germany, the Netherlands, and other parts of Europe between the World Wars dissected the technologies of the graphic arts--photography, typography, photomechanical reproduction--in order to synthesize a new language of vision appropriate to the rapid pace of industrial life. In the 1930s many avant-garde artists emigrated to the United States, where they sought to assimilate modernist forms and theories into the world's most developed consumer culture. A generation of Americans, led by Lester Beall, Paul Rand and Bradbury Thompson, worked alongside European expatriates including Herbert Bayer, Alexey Brodovitch, and Will Burtin. This commercial vanguard transformed American printed media by fitting modernist aesthetics to the interests of corporate communications and popular publishing. A second wave of European modernism arrived in the United States via Switzerland in the late 1950s, when schools of design in Basel and Zurich were refining the experiments of the avant-garde into a rational, systematic methodology. Armin Hofmann, Josef Muller-Brockman, Emil Ruder, and others validated sans serif typefaces, stark photographs, geometric symbols, and gridded page layouts as the basis of a universal language, whose abstract forms would communicate ideas directly to the eye. A small subculture of the American design profession embraced this methodology in the 1960s and 1970s. The typeface Helvetica--whose name is derived from Helvetia, meaning Switzerland--became synonymous with so-called "Swiss design." Massimo Vignelli has been a passionate protagonist of rational design theory in the United States. Born in Italy in 1931 and trained as an architect, Vignelli worked with the Swiss graphic designer Max Huber during the 1950s and emigrated to the United States in 1965. Known for his use of strong horizontal "information bands" and for his unwavering commitment to a narrow canon of elegant, legible typefaces, Vignelli has consistently promoted rational modernism as a typographic method with universal validity.
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