According to Jan Tschichold, the way we should design should be from a logical approach. To design for clarity and function rather than just beauty. Jan Tschichold stated that the essence of the New Typography is clarity, as opposed to the old typography that prioritized beauty. Jan also talks about designing logically, and had a distaste for “central-axis type”. He felt that this way of setting type was illogical because of the “…stressed central parts from the beginning and end of the word sequences is not usually equal but constantly varies from line to line.” Jan also emphasized asymmetry as a better approach than symmetry because it allows more variety and expression. Overall I agree with Jan to this approach on good design. It is the job of the designer to translate the message through design as effectively as possible and that means editing out anything that isn’t relevant to the message to achieve a clear message.
Karl Gerstner emphasized that to solve a problem, you must be able to describe it. You must approach creative decisions intellectually as opposed to approaching it with feelings. Similar to Tschichold, he prefers to approach solutions with logic. He created the”the morphological box of the typogram”. It is basically a list of all the possible design elements to use. I could see myself using it in the future because I feel like it really helps to see the categories of design and the possible elements to use.
Josef Muller Brockmann is also very similar to Jan Tschichold and Karl Gerstner in that he favored a rational and ordered approach to design. He was a huge fan of the grid, believing that this was the form to achieve effective universal communication. He believes that an a professional level a designer’s work should be clearly intelligible, objective, functional and aesthetic quality that reflects mathematical thinking. Overall, I think that approaching design with logic and a system results in the most cohesive result especially in the field of communications, we must be objective in how we design and not approach it with feelings.
