Karl Gerstner is one of Switzerland’s preeminent graphic designers. In 1959, he and Markus Kutter founded the agency Gerstner + Kutter, which later became Gerstner, Gredinger, and Kutter(GGK). Before long, the agency had become one of the largest internationally acclaimed advertising firms in Switzerland. After withdrawing from active agency work, Gerstner designed the corporate identities for such companies as Swiss Air and Burda and Langenscheidt in addition to working as worldwide identity consultant and designer for IBM. In visual language, Gerstner recapitulates his now 50 years of active work as a graphic designer. The ups and downs of a designer’s professional life are vividly illustrated with samples of work that were both realized and rejected by his clients. Describing in detail how he managed to be such a successful and groundbreaking designer, Gerstner relates a narrative that is essential to the history of postwar design. Astutely written and brilliantly designed, visual language follows in the tradition of Gerstner’s earlier period-defining classics, Designing Programs and Compendium for Literates.
“It is a rich visual autobiography, a retrospective, and a memoir. Given its large size and weight, it suggests comparisons to Milton Glaser’s ‘Art Is Work’, Steven Heller’s ‘Paul Rand’, or Wolfgang Weingart’s ‘Typography’. Within its pages, however, it is remarkably different from any of those…One of the great virtues of this book is that it is self-exemplary: Written, organized, and designed by Gerstner, it does not just discuss his work, it is a model of what it enjoins.”-Print Magazine
