Text in German and English. Translated into English by Michael Burke and George Pinter. The development of typography from hot-metal setting to computerized typesetting. Historical background of written languages, the alphabet. Also includes discussions of civil liberties issues and linkages between typography and other arts such as architecture. Proceeds to discuss modern, computerized typography. Glossary, bibliography and illustration credits. Slipcase very lightly soiled. 256 pages. cloth, dust jacket, slipcase. 4to.
Otl Aicher's writings are explorations of the world, a substantive part of his work. In moving through the history of thought and design, building and construction, he assures us of the possibilities of arranging existence in a humane fashion. As ever he is concerned with the question of the conditions needed to produce a civilised culture. These conditions have to be fought for against apparent factual or material constraints and spiritual and intellectual substitutes on offer. Otl Aicher likes a dispute. For this reason, the volume contains polemical statements on cultural and political subjects as well as practical reports and historical exposition. He fights with productive obstinacy, above all for the renewal of Modernism, which he claims has largely exhausted itself in aesthetic visions; he insists the ordinary working day is still more important than the „cultural Sunday“. Wolfgang Jean Stock
Otl Aicher (1922-1991) was an outstanding personality in modern design, he was a co-founder of the legendary Hochschule fur Gestaltung (HfG), the Ulm School of Design, Germany. His works since the fifties of the last century in the field of corporate design and his pictograms for the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich are major achievements in the visual communication of our times. "An integral component of Aicher's work is that it is anchored in a "philosophy of making" inspired by such thinkers as Ockham, Kant or Wittgenstein, a philosophy concerned with the prerequisites and aims, the objects and claims, of design. Aicher's complete theoretical and practical writings on design (which include all other aspects of visual creativity, such as architecture) are available with this new edition of the classic work. If Aicher prefers the analogous and concrete to the digital and abstract he does it with a philosophical intention. He relativizes the role of pure reason. He criticizes the rationality of Modernism as a result of the dominance of purely abstract thinking. Anyone who prefers the abstract to the concrete does not only misunderstand the mutual dependence of concept and view. In Aicher's judgement he is also creating a false hierarchy, a rank order that is culturally fatal. Things that are digital and abstract are not greater, higher and more important than things that are analogous and concrete." Wilhelm Vossenkuhl
„die wüste ist eine denklandschaft. man geht nicht nur zwischen dünen umher, man macht gedankengänge. es verändern sich die gedankenhorizonte.“ Otl Aicher durchquert mehrfach die Sahara, reist zu dritt, zu zweit oder allein - mit seinem jüngsten Sohn Manuel Aicher und dem befreundeten Architekten Eberhard Strauß. Immer zu Fuß. „im gehen verändert sich die landschaft von bild zu bild.“ Was er erlebt, seine Eindrücke und Gedanken hat er in diesem außergewöhnlichen, poetischen Bildband festgehalten. „... ein Sehnsuchtsbuch ...“ manager magazin Aichers großes Wüstenbuch in einer Neuauflage für 24,90 Euro statt 78 Euro Mit 125 farbigen Fotos/ 16 Skizzen
