--- url: /design-history/herbert-matter/ title: "Herbert Matter | Swiss Posters, Knoll & Photomontage | TGDS" template: design-history priority: 3 wordCount: 1073 lastModified: 2026-05-21T05:13:56.115Z site: "The Graphic Design School" tokenCount: 1611 --- # Herbert Matter | Swiss Posters, Knoll & Photomontage | TGDS Herbert Matter Design history · Swiss poster + American identity The Swiss designer who brought photomontage to American corporate design. Herbert Matter (1907–1984) is the Swiss-born designer and photographer whose 1930s tourism posters for the Swiss National Tourist Office set the template for twentieth-century photographic poster design. His postwar American work for Knoll Associates, Guggenheim and the New Haven Railroad translated Swiss modernism into the language of US corporate identity. Biography 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. Design philosophy 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. Key works Pontresina · Engadin (Swiss Tourism, 1935) — multi-layered photographic poster pairing a sunglasses-wearing woman with a ski slope at one-tenth scale. Still widely reproduced in textbooks; MoMA acquired the original in the 1940s. Winterferien — doppelte Ferien (Swiss Tourism, 1936) — extreme close-up of a child’s face with embedded ski-slope imagery. The poster that established Matter’s international reputation. Knoll Associates identity (from 1946) — wordmark, catalogue system, photographic style guide. Operated as a coherent identity programme from 1946 until the 1970s — one of the first long-running American identity systems that used photography as its primary carrier. New Haven Railroad (1954) — NH monogram, locomotive liveries, signage system. The identity that demonstrated European modernism could work at full industrial transport-system scale on American infrastructure. Guggenheim Museum typography (1967) — modular sans-serif system designed for the Frank Lloyd Wright spiral building’s unusual spatial rhythm. A demonstration that identity typography could be architect-responsive. “Alexander Calder: Sculptures and Constructions” poster (1943) — commissioned by MoMA. Collaborated with Calder for decades; Matter’s photographs are the primary visual record of Calder’s studio practice. Influence & legacy Matter’s direct lineage runs through Yale School of Art, where his 24-year teaching tenure under Paul Rand and Alvin Eisenman overlapped with a generation of students who became central to American graphic design: Chermayeff & Geismar, Michael Bierut, Bradbury Thompson, and dozens more. The Yale graphic-design programme’s mid-century character is in large part Matter’s. His photomontage technique became the default vocabulary of postwar advertising and editorial design — the scale-shift pairing, the image-and-type integration, the photograph-as- identity-carrier — first at Swiss tourism scale, then at American corporate scale. Matter’s Knoll relationship established a model — in-house design consultancy rather than once-off identity commission — that Paul Rand later extended at IBM and Chermayeff & Geismar at Mobil. The long consultancy (decades, not years) became the template for how American corporations worked with designers through the postwar period. Learn at TGDS Matter’s work connects to several modules of our curriculum. If his approach interests you, the most direct next steps are: Certificate IV in Design (CUA40720) — covers typography, grid systems, and the Swiss poster tradition Matter carried into American practice. Intensive Foundation Course — 11 modules in typography, layout and image-making. The same craft Matter brought into Swiss editorial and identity design. Certificate of completion, not the Cert IV. A.M. Cassandre — Matter’s Paris studio mentor. Paul Rand — Matter’s Yale faculty colleague and the best comparative study of mid-century American identity. Further reading Mirko Ilić & Steven Heller, Design with Matter (Yale University Press, 2015). Cooper Hewitt Museum, Herbert Matter: Modernist Photography and Graphic Design (Milton Keynes Gallery catalogue, 2002). Reto Caduff (dir.), Visual Language: The Graphic Design of Herbert Matter (documentary, 2014). MoMA Herbert Matter collection page. SFMOMA Herbert Matter archive. Jeffrey Head, “Herbert Matter at the Stanford Library” (Stanford University Libraries archive, 2010).