When Dietmar R. Winkler first arrived in the United States in 1959, he brought with him a postwar European pedigree: a modern design ethos, constructivist principles, and precision hand skills. American design was changing and ripe for these ideas. Winkler was in the right place at the right time, notably with one of the most prestigious universities, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in the Office of Publications (later renamed Design Services), where European ideas were being explored as early as the 1950s. He worked there as a designer from 1965–1970 and helped advance one of America’s most well-known academic graphic programs.In the early 1950s, Winkler studied design at the Kunstschule Alsterdamm, Hamburg, and in 1957, shortly after graduating, secured a position with the emerging pharmaceutical company Chemie Grünenthal GmbH—learning letterpress printing skills, preparing precise comps, and learning how to handle metal type. His contributions to various packaging, exhibition, and publication projects trained him to deal with the complexities of modular typography and proportions through the use of a simplified yet still dynamic grid system. For Winkler, this on-the-job training developed his foundation for “seeing and responding to the visual world through proportion, not through frozen geometry or the grid.”Winkler’s first job in the United States was at the Reach, McClinton and Humphreys designing print collateral and magazine advertisements. For the next five years as a partner in a prosperous design firm Leverett A. Peters and Associates he established a notable reputation. In 1960, he was awarded the prestigious Gold Medal from Art Directors’ Club of Boston. In 1963, before joining MIT, Winkler traveled home to Germany and, through introductions from his American friend Carl Zahn, the gifted, graphic designer, typographer, and former director of publications at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, he visited the type foundries Stempel and Bauer as well as the Klingspor-Museum, focusing on modern book production, typography, and type. Winkler met Hermann Zapf, who “spent a whole day showing me the steps between the conception of a type face and the arduous implementation processes leading to the final letterform for print production.” This extra-curricular education would prove beneficial to Winkler’s career, particularly at MIT Design Services, where Muriel Cooper and the team (Jacqueline Casey and Ralph Coburn) were largely self-taught with no formal education in typography. Winkler recalled, “The department learned typography by trial and error and with hefty punishment for mistakes,” yet Casey and Cooper were “enthusiastic autodidacts,” and on office desks, “were Müller-Brockmann’s books [Grid Systems in Graphic Design, 1968 or The Graphic Artist and his Design Problems, 1961], and later Emil Ruder’s [Typography, A Manual of Deign, 1967].” In the early 1950s, MIT  Office of Publications not Design Services (the MIT Office of Design Services was established in the mid-70s, cutting the editorial/writing/proofreading services, and was closed in 78) established “a graphic-design program enabling all members of the university community to benefit from free, professional design assistance,” wrote Philip B. Meggs in History of Graphic Design. The department’s founder and director, John Mattill, was a science writer/editor whose Modernist vision was the guiding spirit for the early development of academic graphics. Mattill hired Winkler in 1965 as a graphic designer or “staffer” as he called it, alongside the leadership of Casey and fellow designer Coburn, among others. “There was no obvious hierarchy [except possibly age]. Each of our titles [except that of the director] identified us as appointed to the staff of the MIT Office of Publications,” Winkler said. Together, they significantly contributed and enhanced the departments’ development and growth, which was heavily influenced by Swiss and German ideologies and aesthetics and the adopted International Typographic Style that became prevalent throughout the United States during the 1960s and beyond. Winkler designed and handled a great number of summer session brochures, posters, and publications promoting the MIT community, academic lectures and programs, and art exhibitions, ranging from subjects on science to music to technology and more. “I never saw a difference between the status of a pamphlet, booklet as less than that of a poster, in the same ways I don’t see any difference between art and design,” Winkler said. The office frequently consulted with their colleague Zahn on technical support regarding the “availability of special type faces, quality printing resources, paper stocks, paper pricing and especially when the quality of color separations needed to be addressed (…MIT projects had low budgets that would not allow four-color work; they were either black or black plus one addition ink).” Winkler taught the office to think first about the press and paper size, binding and folding options before designing. He introduced the techniques of split fountain printing and the tricks he learned, such as using “odd paper-lots, which had been wrongly trimmed or had small defects” saved on printing costs.By the time Winkler had joined the department, the graphic vocabulary was partially established by Cooper, Casey, and Coburn but also from the influences of English German and Swiss “visiting designers” invited by Mattill throughout the years, most notably Walter Plata, Paul Talman, and Thérèse Moll. Americans also contributed significantly as design staffers and consultants, including Nancy Cahners (1973–1983), David Colley, Bob Cipriani, and Harold Pattek (who worked for Ciba-Geigy). Winkler built upon the department’s early Modernist visions. Given his professional expertise, he not only embraced but also influenced the department’s output including the individual work of Casey and Coburn. Meanwhile, Winkler said, “We all learned from each other.” The office was visited by Müller-Brockmann, Armin Hofmann, and Karl Gerstner and its shelves included poster annuals, seminal graphic design books by Hofmann, Gerstner, and Richard Paul Lohse, and the pioneering periodicals Graphis, Neue Grafik and HfG Ulm Journal, among others. “Surprisingly there was never organized or spontaneous criticism,” and “any critique of the other’s work was taboo,” said Winkler. “We were always excited about working at MIT, because we were surrounded by contemporary architecture,” Winkler said, and it was “quite liberating” to step outside and experience the Alvar Aalto, Paul Rudolph, Araldo Cossutta, I.M. Pei, Le Corbusier, or Eero Saarinen among others; for Winkler, “they represented a new spirit.” Winkler’s designs were harmoniously and clearly composed with modern sans-serif typography. They engaged and informed the user and regularly exposed a hidden beauty. He never favored strict grids but instead employed dynamic modular systems in which “the content provides the form and rhythm.” Winkler experimented with modular abstractions and repetition, pattern, and when budget allowed, photography. His 1969 poster design for a special summer computer course on COBOL programming revealed manipulated, geometric letterforms in a kinetic composition evolving rhythmically down the page. The transparent forms cleverly facilitate the content of the message. “Excellence will always break the back of mediocrity,” Winkler insisted.Winkler left MIT in 1970, because “I wanted to build a house and with my income, no bank would have offered a mortgage.” From then on, he operated as a freelance type and design director specializing in the development and implementation of publication programs and corporate identification systems for: WGBH-TV Educational Foundation, Harvard Business School, Brandeis University, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has been an active and dedicated educator and lecturer. As early as 1973, Alexander Nesbitt, the Chair of the Department of Design, invited him to direct Southeastern Massachusetts University (SMU) Graduate Program in Visual Design. Since then, he has held positions as professor of design at the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, professor at the Visual Design Department, and an adjunct faculty in the Cognitive Science Program of the Psychology Department at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Previously he held the endowed Hall Chair at the Kansas City Art Institute in Missouri, where he directed the Center for Form, Image and Text, among others. Winkler’s fifty years of design contributions to American Modernism still resonate today. His was an instrumental role in advancing modern principles within an academic graphic environment and helped propagate an emerging International Typography Style.