Walter Herdeg

In September 1944, with Germany still at war and Switzerland’s borders shut, a 36-year-old Zurich designer named Walter Herdeg sent out the first issue of a magazine called Graphis. He had named it from the Greek word for a writing instrument. The timing seemed unlikely. The audience — designers and art directors across a fragmented Europe — was, for the moment, unreachable. Herdeg’s bet was that the war would end, the borders would open, and his readers would be waiting.

They were. Within a few years of the armistice, Graphis had become the closest thing graphic design had to an international journal of record: a bimonthly showcase of work from designers, illustrators, and photographers that crossed languages and national traditions in a way no publication had managed before. By the time Herdeg retired in 1986, he had edited 246 issues and launched half a dozen companion annuals. His name is less familiar than those of the designers whose work filled those pages. It deserves to be better known.

Herdeg was born in Zurich on 3 January 1908. His early studies at the Kunstgewerbeschule Zürich brought him under Ernst Keller, one of the leading figures of Swiss poster design. He continued his education in Germany under O.H.W. Hadank, a prominent practitioner of packaging and logo design in Berlin, who employed him as a calligrapher and logo designer. Further periods in Paris, London, and New York gave him an unusually broad sense of what design looked like in different commercial cultures.

Back in Zurich, Herdeg’s first significant commission came from the St. Moritz tourist board, for whom he worked from 1930 to 1938. The brief was to give the Engadin resort a modern visual identity. Herdeg designed a sun symbol with slanted lettering, replaced the resort’s existing snow-hare emblem, and had both elements trademarked — making St. Moritz one of the earliest destinations with a systematically protected visual identity. The poster series he produced for the resort used photomontage, combining photography and type in a way that was markedly ahead of the alpine tourism conventions of the period.

By 1938 he had co-founded an advertising studio and publishing venture with Walter Amstutz, the St. Moritz tourism director who had commissioned the identity work. It was from this partnership that Graphis would emerge.