Influential poster designers

Armin Hofmann
Armin Hofmann is a Swiss graphic designer. He began his career in 1947 as a teacher at the Allgemeine Gewerbeschule Basel School of Art and Crafts at the age of twenty-six. Hofmann followed Emil Ruder as head of the graphic design department at the Basel School of Design) and was instrumental in developing Swiss Style. His teaching methods were unorthodox and broad based, setting new standards that became widely known in design education institutions throughout the world. His independent insights as an educator, married with his rich and innovative powers of visual expression, created a body of work enormously varied - books, exhibitions, stage sets, logotypes, symbols, typography, posters, sign systems, and environmental graphics. His work is recognized for its reliance on the fundamental elements of graphic form - point, line, and shape - while subtly conveying simplicity, complexity, representation, and abstraction.

Studio Dumbar
Studio Dumbar is a highly influential Dutch graphic design agency with outposts in China and Korea. Its work has helped shape, not only Dutch, but international design for over three decades. Studio Dumbar describes its work as ‘visual branding, online branding’, meaning that it creates every visible expression of a brand or organisation — offline and online. Its international scope is reflected in its teams, with an average of seven nationalities in Rotterdam alone.

Fragmented, sometimes complex to the edge of chaos, and layered with complex typography, many Dumbar projects caused consternation among advocates of a more ordered aesthetic. But by the late 1980s many European designers were mimicking Studio Dumbar’s approach, causing Gert Dumbar to place a moratorium on these techniques within his firm.

Paula Scher

Paula Scher (born October 6, 1948, Washington D.C) is an American graphic designer, painter and art educator in design, and the first female principal at Pentagram, which she joined in 1991. For more than three decades Paula Scher has been at the forefront of graphic design. Iconic, smart and unabashedly populist, her images have entered into the American vernacular. Her style involved bold colors and skewed grid.

Joesf Miller-Brockman

Josef Müller-Brockmann (May 9, 1914 – August 30, 1996) was a Swiss graphic designer and teacher. He studied architecture, design and history of art at both the University and Kunstgewerbeschule in Zürich. In 1936 he opened his Zurich studio specialising in graphic design, exhibition design and photography. From 1951 he produced concert posters for the Tonhalle in Zurich. In 1958 he became a founding editor of New Graphic Design along with R.P. Lohse, C. Vivarelli, and H. Neuburg. In 1966 he was appointed European design consultant to IBM.

He is recognised for his simple designs and his clean use of typography (notably Akzidenz-Grotesk), shapes and colours which inspire many graphic designers in the 21st century.

Müller-Brockman was author of several books on design and visual communication.

Herbert Matter

Herbert Matter (April 25, 1907 – May 8, 1984) was a Swiss-born American photographer and graphic designer known for his pioneering use of photomontage in commercial art. The designer's innovative and experimental work helped shape the vocabulary of 20th-century graphic design.

Born in Engelberg, Switzerland, Matter studied painting at the École des Beaux-Arts in Geneva and at the Académie Moderne in Paris with Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant. He worked with Adolphe Mouron Cassandre, Le Corbusier and Deberny & Peignot. In 1932, he returned to Zurich, where he designed posters for the Swiss National Tourist Office and Swiss resorts. The travel posters won instant international acclaim for his pioneering use of photomontage combined with typeface.