Herbert Matter

Herbert Matter was born in Engelberg, Switzerland, in 1907. He studied painting at the École des Beaux-Arts in Geneva and then in Paris, first with Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant at the Académie Moderne. In 1929 he joined the Paris studio of A.M. Cassandre, where he learned the lithographic-poster craft first-hand from the single most influential poster designer of the interwar period.

Through the early 1930s Matter also worked with Le Corbusier on photography commissions for the architectural publication L’Esprit Nouveau. His combination of Cassandre’s poster tradition and Corbusian photographic practice produced the signature technique of his mature work: the photographic poster as a layered, scale-shifting composition.

In 1934 Matter returned to Switzerland and took a commission from the Swiss National Tourist Office to produce a series of tourism posters. The 1934–36 series — Pontresina · Engadin, Winterferien, All roads lead to Switzerland — are now the most-reproduced Swiss posters of the interwar period and form the foundational set of twentieth-century photomontage tourism design.

Political pressure pushed him to emigrate to the United States in 1936, where he worked initially as a magazine photographer for Harper’s Bazaar under Alexey Brodovitch and for Vogue and Fortune throughout the 1940s. In 1946 Florence Knoll recruited him as design consultant for the newly independent Knoll Associates furniture company — a relationship that continued for twenty years and produced the identity and catalogue system that made Knoll visible as a modernist furniture company.

In 1952 he joined the Yale School of Art faculty at Paul Rand’s invitation, teaching photography and graphic design until 1976. His postwar American identity work — New Haven Railroad (1954), Guggenheim Museum (1967), the CBS corporate photographic archive — translated the Swiss photographic-poster vocabulary into an American corporate- identity register. He died in Southampton, New York, in 1984; AIGA awarded him its Medal a year earlier.

Matter’s working premise was photographic. In a Swiss tradition that was already committed to grid, typography and geometry, he argued for the photograph as a compositional tool of equal standing — not an illustration pasted into a layout but a structural element of the design itself.

“The designer must not only work with and for the camera, he must work with and for the printing press.” — Herbert Matter

Three commitments organised the work. First, scale shift as a design decision. A Matter poster typically pairs a very large photographic element with a smaller one, letting the scale difference produce the narrative — close-up face and distant ski-slope, massive hand and distant train. The move became standard in postwar advertising and editorial design.

Second, integration of photograph and typography. Matter resisted the separation between photograph and caption typical of 1930s practice. His posters set type on, inside, across and around photographs — treating typography as a photographic element and photographs as typographic ones.

Third, identity as photographic system. His Knoll work established that a furniture company’s identity could be carried as much by a photographic style — consistent lighting, consistent composition, consistent paper — as by a logo or a wordmark. The idea was novel in 1946; by the 1970s it was standard corporate-identity practice.