New Ideas — Design After Modernism

Swiss International Style gave graphic design its most complete doctrine: the grid, the sans-serif typeface, objective hierarchy, the white margin. By the mid-1970s that doctrine had become a default — practised more as reflex than conviction. The designers who broke from it were not rejecting discipline. They were testing what discipline could become when turned on itself.

Wolfgang Weingart was teaching at the Basel School of Design when he began pulling apart the grid’s premises. His phototypesetting experiments — inconsistent letterspace, overlapping weights, diagonal lines cutting across the page — were framed as rigorous investigations, not rebellion. His American students, among them April Greiman, took those investigations home and gave them a new name: New Wave.

April Greiman’s move from Basel to Los Angeles in the late 1970s planted Weingart’s formal experiments in different soil. California had none of the European print tradition that had made the Swiss grid feel inevitable. It had sun, space, and — from 1984 — the Macintosh.

Greiman’s 1986 commission for Design Quarterly was the moment the two strands converged. Working on a Macintosh 512K with an Apple scanner, she produced an entire magazine issue as a single two-by-six-foot folded sheet — one side a pixelated self-portrait assembled from digitised video stills, the other a dense spatial field of type and image. The Walker Art Center published 17,000 copies. The piece made the case, incontrovertibly, that the personal computer was not a tool for cleaning up design but for making it messier in the most productive sense.

Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko launched Emigre in Berkeley in 1984 — the same year Apple released the Macintosh. The timing was not coincidental. Licko designed typefaces directly for low-resolution bitmap output, treating the screen’s pixel grid as a formal constraint rather than a limitation. VanderLans used the magazine’s layouts to test what desktop publishing could do that offset litho had not.

By 1988 Emigre was the primary platform for New Wave discourse in America: its content and its form were inseparable, each issue a demonstration of the argument it was also making in words. David Carson’s later work for Ray Gun (1992–) pushed the deconstructive impulse further, but Emigre had already established the intellectual ground.