Wolfgang Weingart Overview

Never one to downplay his own achievements, Wolfgang Weingart explains why he has shifted his emphasis from design to teaching: "I had to stop in order to let the things that I produced sink in, and wait until the next, real... [more]

Never one to downplay his own achievements, Wolfgang Weingart explains why he has shifted his emphasis from design to teaching: "I had to stop in order to let the things that I produced sink in, and wait until the next, real explosion comes, so that designers in the new decade can copy me again." Labeled by some as the father of New Wave Graphics for his dramatic departure from Swiss style and his maverick attitude toward design, Weingart considers himself an "educational orphan." After studying under various mentors, Weingart abandoned apprenticeship and institutional study altogether, and accepted a position on the typography faculty at the Basel School of Design. His unique style of wide lettering, spacing, underlining, and layering photography with typographic images had an immediate impact on the design world, and its influence on subsequent design developments was instantaneous. Weingart advocates a triumvirate relationship between design identity, typographic elements, and printing technique. His combative relationship with new technology is manifest in his efforts to prove, through both theory and practice, that visual complexities can be produced by hand as well as by technology. A teacher with an aggressive style, Weingart has given up designing to travel the world in order to spread his idiosyncratic vision of design to a new generation of graphic artists. [show less]