Karl Gerstner was a Swiss designer, typographer, author, and artist. He developed a systematical solution for when he was making Swiss Typography. Karl feels that problem-solving is the best way to approach design, he viewed Graphic Design as a very technical field, as he states, “This implies: not to make creative decisions as prompted by feeling but by intellectual criteria. The more exact and complete these criteria are, the more creative the work becomes.” Karl created this table and labeled each box with a potential solution so that after he’s through with a design, he can simply check each category and see whether he received anything from them. He organizes with grids, which he claims to assist him a lot. In “Designing Programmes,” there is an abundance of numbers, equations, units, and quite frankly, a whole lot of things I barely understood. “The creative process is to be reduced to an act of selection. Designing means: to pick out determining elements and combining them. Seen in these terms, designing calls for method.”
Jan Tschichold was a German calligrapher, typographer, and book designer. He played a significant role in the development of graphic design in the 20th century – first, by developing and promoting principles of typographic modernism, and subsequently idealizing conservative typographic structures. Just like Karl Gerstner, Jan also had a similar outlook and believed that art and design are a balance of creativity and logic. “Every part of a text relates to every other part by a definite, logical relationship of emphasis and value, predetermined by content. It is up to the typographer to express this relationship clearly and visibly through type sizes and weight, arrangement of lines, use of color, photography, etc. The typographer must take the greatest care to study how his work is read and ought to be read”.According to Tschichold, a typographer should design in a way that is clear and uses other forms of design to relate to one another in a logical relationship; they work well with one another and in harmony. Jan Tschichold emphasized the change in typographers’ priorities; reforming their typographical designs to have a stronger sense of clarity rather than “beauty,” or the aesthetic of the typography. Tschichold states, “It is up to the typographer to express this relationship clearly and visibly through type sizes and weight, arrangement of lines, use of color, photography, etc. The typographer must take the greatest care to study how his work is read and ought to be read.”
Josef Müller-Brockmann was a Swiss graphic designer, author, and educator, he was a Principal at Muller-Brockmann & Co. design firm. He was a pioneer of the International Typographic Style. Josef Müller-Brockmann states “Every visual creative work is a manifestation of the character of the designer. It is a reflection of his knowledge, his ability, and his mentality”. He goes into detail as to why the grid is so important and how it has been helpful in the creative process. Josef takes on an approach that highlights the very same idea but that those elements that can not be categorized from Gerstner function, which are unable to be organized or chaotic that can indeed put places into a program that does the opposite of what they are. He believed his system should contribute to the general culture in terms of the “ clearly intelligible, objective, functional, and aesthetic quality of mathematical thinking.” Müller-Brockmann considers grid system literacy to be important for professional designers. This is a statement of professional ethos: the designer’s work should be plainly comprehensible, objective, useful, and attractive in mathematical thinking quality. “The use of the grid as an ordering system is the expression of a certain mental attitude inasmuch as it shows that the designer conceives his work in terms that are constructive and oriented to the future.”
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