Swiss Modernism

After the Second World War, designers in Switzerland and Germany — Josef Müller-Brockmann, Max Bill, the team of Müller and Brockmann's contemporaries at Basel — refined modernism into a system: mathematical grids, objective photography, flush-left ragged-right type, and the neutral voices of Helvetica and Univers.

The International Typographic Style, as it is also known, gave design a language of clarity and order that institutions, airlines, and corporations worldwide still speak today. Its critics called it cold; its practitioners called it honest.