Education

My educational experience in Germany was an early concentration in graphic design at Kunstschule Alsterdamm in Hamburg, an accelerated specialist program that concentrated on professional visual exploration of objective and non-objective graphic imaging—namely, direct observation of natural phenomena, and hand-skill translation from drawing into graphic form; also the construction of classical serif and san-serif letterform. In this respect, today graphic design is more about typography and photography, and I would venture a guess that the majority of practitioners fit less into the category of graphic design because the skill to craft convincing graphic icons since my schooling has eroded over time. I believe it is still one of the skills that will never be usurped by any of the emerging technologies. However, the processes are very time-consuming and therefore, since professional practice embraces expediency and time-efficiency, there will be fewer designers like Hans Erni, who designed the “Save our water” poster, or Fritz Bühler’s poster for Union coal briquette, the extensive work by Armin Hofmann, and the designs by Donald Brun or Herbert Leupin, from whom we learned. Whose work will challenge Claude Kuhn-Klein’s well-studied graphics for the Bern Museum of Natural History?

For a very deep emersion in the technical aspects of typography or photography, the school had no facilities. I never saw a photostat machine or students use any photographic images. It was all about graphic translation, not very different from Basel; namely, translating a drawing into a convincing graphic image, without technical tools other than a brush for white and then to counteract with another for black. In America that skill was identified with Yale and Basel.

But if design historians want to credit Basel with this, they ignore the Central European design activities at most, if not all, European schools. The same techniques were used by the majority of graphic designers. For instance: the Yale PLAKA mystique became a farce for designers who had been trained in Europe. PLAKA was a Casein paint that, when hardened, could never be dissolved with water. Shop keepers in the city and in small towns on Saturday morning would write the various deals—eggs fifty-five cents—in bright PLAKA colors on the outside window of the shop. When dry, rain or snow would not dissolve the message. In midday, the staff would come out with razor blades and very quickly remove the messages, getting ready to ring in Sunday. During my time, most designers in Hamburg used Pelikan PLAKA. It was nothing special.

Also, during my years in Hamburg, there was no prejudice against illustration, although fashion illustration was phased out from the school’s curriculum. Sophisticated imaging was always encouraged. Many of my classmates would have made great illustrators as well as designers. If a project demanded an illustration then one would look through one’s talents and solve it appropriately. Students were comfortable with, and accomplished in, drawing from nature, like landscape drawing in Blankenese, a beautiful community north of Hamburg or at the Hamburg harbor. In addition to life-drawing, a great portion of time was spent at Hagenbeck’s Zoo and at the Museum of Anthropology, copying artifacts from original cultures and translating them into striking poster graphics. Because photography was not taught and there were no photostat machines, the studio experience is totally eyes-on and hands-on. There was no type-shop. Instead, one was trained to expertly construct classical serif and san-serif typefaces, which had to be rendered in all sizes to perfection. I learned that in the US there is an unfortunate gulf between graphic design, fine arts, illustration, and advertising. My judgement is, and was, that any high skill should be acknowledged, but with the caveat, none should call themselves artist, and that painters, sculptors, and printmakers should be known by the tools that they use. Bestowing the value term of “art” should be reserved for history and culture, because not everything that shines like gold turns out to be gold. In this country, the art nomenclature is discriminatory, pitting fine artists against applied artists, who in return discriminate against commercial artists, illustrators, and advertising artists. Let’s make all into “visual manipulators of contents in relationship to context,” even if it is not a glamorous title, but this would cut the debate off. One should just recognize the quality in which the communication is presented, by using the semiotic triangle. I never gave myself the title of graphic designer, I wanted to be known as visual designer, because that allowed me to work on anything that is, was, and will be visual.

Kunstschule Alsterdamm insisted that if one had other interests in subjects that were not part of, or offered by, its curriculum, one should pursue these interests during one’s free time through the various adult education programs of the city. The student was responsible for her/his education. To claim that the school did not offer certain important topics and subjects was taken as an insult, as a student could take advantage of all other programs in the city.

At that time, the skills that were imparted by the school were exceptional. Proof was that I had only one interview to be appointed to the staff of an in-house studio of a major German pharmaceutical house. We all could render anything and everything, from letter to image, in any size and in any color, and do this time-efficiently. Even when I arrived in the US, I benefitted from these exemplary skills. In 1960, all Boston advertising art directors used carpenter’s chisel pencils to indicate headlines and switched to markers. I was able to present any of the type styles in paint and with the brush, making the layouts look close to printed examples.

Gerd Setzke, the director of the school, minced few words. He always questioned the student’s commitment. If not design, what else would you be doing? Would you or for what incentives would you give up your primary vocation? Then why would you not leave and pursue your interests immediately? Does it really matter, that if a tree fell in the forest it did or did not make a sound, as long as you heard it, recognized it, and responded to it? Did it really matter what anybody says about the work, if you were aware and clear about it and came to that conclusion honestly? So, why wait? His advice was simple: Don’t talk, but do. Live and learn. Invest in yourself. Grab at stars that everybody tells you are unreachable, and you will find ways and energies in yourself to touch them. A sign over my design desk stated: “Ideas are easy…great interpretations are hard to find!”

Alsterdamm’s facilities were spotless, simulating corporate professional work environments that I have only seen at the ID, the Institute of Design in Chicago, and at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. At Alsterdamm, everything had to be produced by hand; from rendering type and image or painting large backgrounds without streaks and flaws or rendering embossed images into convincing illusions. The prototypes of posters, packages, and booklets were to exact their printed version. I still like the satin PLAKA finish, because, when applied properly, it resembled the flat inks used for silk-screen. Gouache paints and India inks rounded out the inventory.

The school was tough. Each student was made responsible for the reputation of the school. In the first two years, students that could not fit themselves to the tempo or philosophy of the school were unceremoniously and immediately ejected on the spot, making room for more committed students, as was any student caught plagiarizing. It was “design boot camp.” Those who survived loved it, but it is true, that some sensitive talents were crushed.

The walls in our studio classrooms were covered with the full-sized original posters from all over the world, especially the work of French, German, Italian, Polish, and Swiss poster designers, like Anton Stankowski, Donald Brun, Celestino Piatti, Herbert Leupin, Josef Müller-Brockmann, Armin Hofmann, Savignac, and Cassandre. We were also introduced to the work of Gottfried Honneger, the visual books by his wife, Warja Lavater, some of which carried a very clear narrative but no text. We were made aware of the budding Swiss design avant-garde, like Therese Moll, Karl Gerstner, Fred Troller, and others.

Gerd Setzke, the director of the school, always vacationed in Switzerland or Italy. After any of his trips, he would bring back posters of prominent international designers, during an epoch in which posters had important social and cultural standing in European countries. Who could ignore the posters of a Savignac in Paris or a Celestino Piatti in Germany? Teachers talked about the specific niche that O.H.W Hadank held in the very sophisticated and formal work for holiday packaging for the cigarette industry—of course, long before the discovery of innate health risks.

Studio classes were convened for six hours, five days a week, 9:00 am to 3:00 pm, without any interruptions. Breaks were frowned upon, and one snuck out for a sandwich, but only for very few minutes. “If you want to waste time, then join Lerchenfeld”—the Hamburg Art Academy—a direct competitor with Max Bill and Kurt Kranz on the faculty. There was no chit-chat, no radio. Conversations had to be professional. There were very few personal relationships between students. The school had no campus, no dormitories, and the majority of students were commuters, traveling between cities. There was a requirement to wear white lab coats. All personal equipment, from rulers to sheers, had to be professional and had to be at the work desk. If one had forgotten a tool that was needed, hell began to freeze over, and if it could not be borrowed from a colleague without interrupting him, one was excused for the day. Tools that were not considered professional, like dried out paint tubes or jars, were unceremoniously confiscated and discarded. The director of the school would take the pinking shears out of a student’s hand and throw it out of the many-story high window. It was boot camp.

My design school training is that of a minimalist and structuralist, influenced by Concrete Art, especially Max Bill, Wassili Kandinsky, Josef Albers, Gottfried Honegger, Max Mahlmann, and El Lissitzki. I audited studio classes taught by Max Mahlmann on Constructivism and L’art Concrete in a Hamburg adult education program, not connected to the school. On our professional bookshelf were the issues of Graphis, Novum Gebrauchsgraphic, and Publicite, but also the Druckspiegel, and the emerging visual language of the “New Graphic” through issues of New Graphic Design, a new Swiss journal edited by R.P. Lohse, C. Vivarelli, and H. Neuburg. But it was not as if the focus was on Swiss graphics. There was no prejudice against any work, if it was unique and outstanding. We were made to respond to anything that was put in front of us. So, we knew the work of George Him and Jan Lewitt of the British Lewitt-Him design partnership or the work of Waldemar Swierzy, Jan Lenica, or Cieslewicz Roman of Poland. If you took a pause for coffee, you better not be caught without a professional journal on your lap and a notebook.

One day, unannounced, to the surprise of students, all posters had disappeared. On their desks was an elevation drawing of the four studio walls. Each student had to draw the poster images, identify the designer, get the color count correct, and be able to identify the type faces. None of the teachers had introduced the work on the walls. Of course, the first time around, most of the students could not identify anything, but after the director promised that next time he would dismiss those who were not interested enough in seeing or in investigating in detail that which surrounded them.

The same was true when the director would casually inquire about which route, street car, or mode of transportation a student took to get to school. He immediately would point out that a new poster had been installed at this corner or that intersection. The student was asked about subject, designer, style, and type fonts, and to provide an aesthetic analysis. The ceiling would come down when a student was incapable of reporting. All of us went through this kind of humiliation, but just once. We never again dared to press our luck. From that day on, every student was vitally aware of any new poster, any new design or architecture…anywhere.

My First Professional Assignment

It started with a small ad in one of the Hamburg newspapers, which announced a design position in a recently established pharmaceutical house of a small town about 500 miles southwest of Hamburg. It looked very enticing. One was to submit a letter of interest, a resume, and a rounded-out portfolio.

The school’s policy was to never send one’s work or let it be out of sight. So I was not inclined to do that. I also did not like the ways in which the public typing-pool constructed both the format and contents of the introductory letter, the statement of interest, and the resume. The secretary thought my demands were so odd, but she finally produced according to my wishes.

Some of the school’s brashness had rubbed off on me, and against all advice, even the ad’s requirements, I bought a ticket, and after nearly a five-hour train ride showed up in front of the personnel director of the pharmaceutical company Chemie Grünenthal GmbH. He was shocked and showed no interests whatsoever to interview me, because I had not followed any of the instructions. After my explanation of personal expense, time spent, and that I would never send the portfolio, and the afternoon was fading, he finally relented and introduced me to one of the vice presidents. It was about 6:00 pm, I missed my train connection back, but I walked out of the building with a wonderful contract in my hand.

The head of the design office was trained in historical restoration. He had an amazing color sense, and I learned a lot from him. However, he knew little about graphic design, especially as it had been introduced to me, and so the design tasks were divided between him and the rest of the group. He developed the design of the trade exhibition stands, which in some cases were daunting tasks, because deadlines were short, and he had to deal with the carpenters, painters, and electricians. I had seen some of Müller-Brockmann’s design systems for three-dimensional structures, and persuaded the exhibition team to adopt the idea, not necessarily to copy it, because rather than designing each exhibition from scratch, the team was able to use modular panels again and re-assemble them easily for different sizes of spaces and exhibitions. Another designer helped him and became responsible for the advertisements. A print production person prepared the boards for the camera and was responsible for the implementations of the design for the vast packaging inventory. I became pretty much in charge of the direct mail area, which fit me like a glove. 

I loved designing, and being new to the town, not interested in sitting in my small rented room or hanging out in pubs, I threw myself into my assignment, spending as much time trying to understand the products as well as the in-house letterpress print and foundry/hot metal type-shop. Everyone was very helpful and frequently saved me from failure. Sometimes luck was on my side, for instance when fifteen-hundred notebooks went out in which “Compendium” was spelled the German way, namely with a “K,” not as any pharmaceutical house would have preferred, in Latin with a “C.” Nowadays I would have been fired on the spot.

The Reasons to Come to the US

Not only its own preparations, Chemie Grünenthal GmbH produced and distributed pharmaceuticals licensed by American Cyanamid, Lederle, and other companies for the German and European markets. The American advertisements, which were supposed to guide us in shaping ads and collateral material, were hard to understand. There were meetings about the meaning of the visual messages, and one came to the conclusion that, in American advertising, metaphors were being used that were not part of the German culture. In simple terms, in German design of the mid-fifties, things were presented in super-realistic ways. It is what it is! The object was seen in great detail, without embellishment, without overlaid metaphors, linguistically or abstractly. In some ways, the images were interpreted as presenting objects in their essential form and therefore as minimalistic in content, even if the form was placed in the abstract expressionistic category. In the US, in advertising, objects were given metaphorical attitudes. One example may explain this. Raymond Loewy’s drawings for his Studebaker car designs showed an aggressiveness, equal to a dynamic human stance or vigorous body posture. Loewy’s were more than just engineering drawings. Another lends a comparison between the minimalist Knoll furniture presentation by Masimo Vignelli during the sixties and seventies and the 1980 Knoll Hot Seat poster by Woody Pirtle in form of a red hot pepper.

This dilemma intrigued me greatly, and I decided to take a one-year sabbatical to study in the US. I applied for scholarships to several schools, was admitted at several, but because of budgets did not choose any of the schools farther away from the East Coast. I ended up at RISD as President’s International Fellow. In Germany, if one received a scholarship, the funding included the cost of academics plus room and board. At RISD, it included tuition only. But RISD made great efforts for me to travel to New York and to CIBA, an internationally well-known pharmaceutical house in Summit, NJ, where I met Jack Maramras and James Fogelman, to compare notes on visual metaphors. Fogelman was one of the founders of Unimark International. Jack Marmaras connected me with Sudler & Hennessey, the New York advertising agency for CIBA, where I met several times with Herb Lubalin to discuss the difference of use of metaphor. 

When I arrived, it was quickly clear that there were no curricular resources for my specific study interests. There was no graduate program, and so my greatest idea and information exchange was with the senior design class. The true challenge was to become fluent in English and deal with puns and the regional use of terms, as well as the complete shifts between regions, where a hoagie becomes a submarine sandwich or a grinder, a wedge, a spuckie, and a simple milkshake turns into a frappé, a cabinet, a shake, a fribbie, a doorknob, or a cabinet. 

I took advantage of the foundry type-shop and the photo studios as well as the Brown University Libraries, which had a fairly large collection of Renaissance books, published prior to 1500, at the Anne Brown Memorial Library

Although I never took courses with Alexander Nesbitt, the calligrapher and typography historian, he was the only person at that time who showed interests in my queries. He was a Germanophile, had visited Germany in the thirties, spoke my language exquisitely. I learned from him, and his interests are still with me. He very sensibly tied graphic design, and especially typography, to linguistics to allow visual language to connect with all the communication issues embedded in this massive subject matter, which includes culture, customs, behavior, morals, and ethics. Much later, after he was appointed in 1965 by SMU Southeastern Massachusetts as chair of the Design Department, through Harold Pattek, one of his colleagues, I was offered an appointment in 1973, which I accepted.

Profile: Kunstschule Alsterdamm, Hamburg

Kunstschule Alsterdamm, one of the first new schools in Germany after WW II—established  primarily as a concentration for training professional graphic designers, was founded in 1946 by Gerd F. Setzke, a graphic designer, in Hamburg. Its first location was on Alsterdamm Boulevard, which was later renamed Ballindamm, named after Albert Ballin, a German shipping magnate who was the general director of the Hamburg-America Line, at times the world’s largest shipping company. The school owes its name to the location on the boulevard at the edge of the Innen-Alster. In 1955, the school moved to Ferdinandstraße.

Gerd F.G. Setzke, born 1912 in Hamburg, studied with Hugo Meier-Thur. (Meier-Thur, who taught from 1910 to 1943 at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg, was killed at Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp in 1943.) Setzke, after working at a printing company, worked for the publisher Broschek. From 1931 he freelanced—his clients included Volkswagen and BASF—and was, between 1941–43 a lecturer of commercial art at the Hamburg Meisterschule für Mode (college of fashion). His studio was destroyed in war. In 1946, he founded the Kunstschule Alsterdamm, which became the largest private school for graphic design in the Federal Republic of Germany. 

Some published information on Gerd F.G. Setzke:
•
Vollmer, 1958
•
Eberhard Hölscher, ‘Atelier Setzke, commercial art’, Gebrauchsgraphik (International Advertising Art), Berlin: Phönix Illustrationsdruck und Verlag GmbH (later: ‘Gebrauchsgraphik’ Druck und Verlag GmbH), 1933-71. Published from Munich from 1950., March 1955, pp. 36–41.
•
Guido Dieter, ‘Kunstschule Alsterdamm Hamburg’, novum, Jan. 1979, pp. 61-5.
•
E. Hölscher, ‘The Alsterdamm Art School’, Gebrauchsgraphik (International Advertising Art), Berlin: Phönix Illustrationsdruck und Verlag GmbH (later: ‘Gebrauchsgraphik’ Druck und Verlag GmbH), 1933-71. Published from Munich from 1950., June 1960, pp. 50–55.

Gerd F. Setzke developed a practical training program, which he and his team of teachers, Holger Hilgendorf, Dora Lühr, Max H. Mahlmann, and Lilo v. d. Horst, implemented. He led the school through his highly successful training methods to high professional recognition at home and abroad. The faculty in later years included graphic designers, draftsmen, painters, and printmakers like Jan Buchholz, Lothar Böhm, Horst Busecke, Oskar Haacks, Günter G. Lange, Erwin Lindner-Bauer and Lothar Walter as well as many others. Thanks to the highly disciplined, nearly monastic methodology, combined with conceptual clarity, aesthetic accuracy, and craftsmanship as its hallmark, numerous alumni built the reputation that the school enjoys to this day. 

In the fifties, the no-nonsense curriculum was oriented toward professional requirements: design of posters, packaging, brochures, advertisements, book covers, etc., as well as the latest international developments in graphic design. The basic graphic competencies were thoroughly trained (for example, letterform construction, rendering and freehand drawing from nature). As one of its means to show its prowess, Alsterdamm enters and wins numerous competitions at the national and international levels. 

•
Some of today’s highlights
•
Seventy years of professional competence and training
•
Maximum twenty-five students per semester in a disciplined, collegial, and dedicated atmosphere
•
Comprehensive know-how of all relevant aspects in the professional field of practice.
•
Focus on creativity, conceptual strength, and technical competence
•
Individual support and responsibility for one’s own creative development
•
New thinking, seeing, and shaping the aesthetic visual competence
•
Training of group work and social skills
•
Understanding project tasks for increasingly independent, strategically sound problem-solving
•
A wide network of professional contacts for internships and jobs
•
Inspiring mix of classic craftsmanship, creative techniques (in addition, today’s digital know-how)
•
A concentrated program of museum/studio visits and lectures

Alsterdamm Boot Camp

My first weeks at the school were scary. Looking around, I could not find anyone who started as lowly as I did. Many students came from very sophisticated high schools. Some had already semesters of art or design education behind them. I lacked all of their skills. For the first two semesters, I was in constant fear that I would be jettisoned. This would have been an extreme problem for me as failure was not something my father would accept: “What would the neighbors think?”

1
Classes started at 9:00 am on the first day, sharply. We got instructions for using ink and pen and feeling out the proportions of Futura capital letters, drawing two parallel lines onto brown paper from large roles, and then using the pen to render the shapes of the alphabet. We were told to have absolutely no water glasses or other tools on our desks, especially not on the angled and cantilevered drawing board.

Around 11:00 am, I took a breather, spending some minutes contemplating my efforts, when suddenly, I had not seen the director come into the room, my large brown paper flew up into the air, and my drawing board with ink and the forbidden water glasses flipped up and crashed onto the floor. He saw that I disobeyed his order of how to set up my workstation and tipped the drawing board. While I was mortified and tried to clean up the mess, he kicked the utensils and glasses across the floor and room, making the mess even worse.

He then took me by the collar, picked up several of the sheets with my timid lettering from the floor and dragged me into the junior class, hung up my pretty mediocre first tries and had the advanced students critique my results, while he bellowed and screamed, promising me that I would not last into next week.

2
Assignments were usually given out around 3:00 pm on Fridays with deadline for Monday 9:00 am, taking care of the weekend. Everything had to be properly matted with acetate and cleanly backed. All tape had to be hidden. There were no further instructions other than: Take a milk bottle—at that time in this region, the bottle had a square base and tapered about from the middle into a cylinder, with a round opening at the top—draw it from all sides and make a convincing graphic translation. We were asked to have our work up by 9:00 am, sharp.

I arrived early, hung my translations, made sure they were square, and was ready for the critique. The director came in, and without hesitation, not even a second seemed to have passed, yelled in a booming voice: “Who is the A…, who did the Penguin?” Of course it was not me. I had made a graphic translation form a milk bottle. Then I noticed that the sea of colleagues parted around me and my piece. Suddenly I stood alone infant of the director, who ripped down my solution and walked right over it. Again, I got a lecture about my short longevity unless things changed. I was devastated. 

3
This was my last humiliation. Same as before, we received the assignment to design a signet with our initials on Friday with the obligatory Monday deadline, and the requirement of ten different solutions, nicely matted. Monday came and I saw all kinds of unfortunate omens, which materialized as soon as Setzke walked in: “Who is the A…, who designed the toilet seat?” The sea parted again. The sermon added little to what I had come to fear.

Well I learned very quickly, and swore, I would never be caught again in humiliation. I also got the hang of the processes. The book shelves were loaded with plenty of great examples. The classroom was surrounded by the best graphic posters from all over the world, and communicating with upper classmates who always were helpful—even though they would not indulge of coddle me—made the goals of the school very clear.

The trauma between me and the director disappeared in the middle of the second semester, and I began to work in his design studio completing small design and office assignments. I was on the way.