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Most people think of a yogurt brand when they hear, “Swiss style.� As designers, we may be a bit more familiar with the Swiss school of design. Some call it the evolution of modern design. Others may think of it as just a step to where design style is now. Both may be correct.

Josef Müller-Brockmann (May 9^th, 1914 – August 30^th, 1996) is considered one of the key players in the Swiss School of international Style. When one considers the time of his career, which included the Second World War, the Cold War and the growing influence of a Europe on the mend from destruction and fear, he certainly influenced not only a design style that influenced designers on a global scale. It was a time of rebirth for many nations that lay in ruins, rebuilding and rethinking centuries of tradition that were forced to change due to the brutality of war and cruelty.

Müller-Brockmann was more than just a man who sought to form what is now labeled the Swiss School; Constructivism, De Still, Suprematism and the Bauhaus, all of which pushed his designs in a new direction that opened doors for creative expressions in graphic design, influenced him. Among his peers he is probably the most easily recognized when looking at that period.

Perhaps his most recognized work was done for the Zurich Town Hall as poster advertisements for its theater productions. The work is graphic, rather than illustrative. Some critics say these posters created a mathematical harmony, which reflected the harmony of music. If one studies posters before that time, they would probably all agree that these are a bold and different way to play to visual messages dealing with music. Who would think of such a graphic? Who would dare execute such work at that time? If you look at the jazz and fusion albums in America at the time, you can see Müller-Brockmann’s influence.

The Grid System: Constrictive Or Freeing?

His design sense of the 1950s aimed to create posters that communicated with the masses. This was no small feat as the pieces had to communicate across a language barrier, with English, French, German and Italian speaking populations in Switzerland alone. It was the harmony and simplicity of these pieces that influenced a post-war world that had lost the sense of central nationalism and gained a lesson in the need for globalization. Müller-Brockmann was soon established as the leading practitioner and theorist of the Swiss Style, which sought a universal graphic expression through a grid-based design, purged of extraneous illustration and subjective feeling.

The grid was the prioritization and arrangement of typographic and pictorial elements with the meaningful use of color, set into a semblance of order, based on left-to-right, top-to-bottom. According to Wikipedia, the grid system is, “a two-dimensional structure made up of a series of intersecting vertical and horizontal axes used to structure content. The grid serves as an armature on which a designer can organize text and images in a rational, easy to absorb manner.�

Despite that dry description, the page does go on to add, “After World War II, a number of graphic designers, including Max Bill, Emil Ruder, and Josef Müller-Brockmann, influenced by the modernist ideas of Jan Tschichold’s Die neue Typographie (The New Typography), began to question the relevance of the conventional page layout of the time. They began to devise a flexible system able to help designers achieve coherency in organizing the page. The result was the modern typographic grid that became associated with the International Typographic Style. The seminal work on the subject, Grid systems in graphic design by Müller-Brockmann, helped propagate the use of the grid, first in Europe, and later in North America.â€�

In an interview with Eye Magazine in the winter of 1995 (a year before his death), Müller-Brockmann spoke about what order meant to him:

“Order was always wishful thinking for me. For 60 years I have produced disorder in files, correspondence and books. In my work, however, I have always aspired to a distinct arrangement of typographic and pictorial elements, the clear identification of priorities. The formal organization of the surface by means of the grid, a knowledge of the rules that govern legibility (line length, word and letter spacing and so on) and the meaningful use of color are among the tools a designer must master in order to complete his or her task in a rational and economic manner.�

The KISS Method (Keep It Simple, Stupid).

Müller-Brockmann is recognized for his simple designs and his clean use of typography, notably Akzidenz-Grotesk, shapes and colors, which inspires many graphic designers in the 21st century. As with the French posters in the 1890s, Müller-Brockmann and his peers also attempted to attract customers and sell products with bold, simplicity. The posters that served to attract an audience to events, especially music events and museum exhibitions embraced the abstract geometrical shapes the style is noted for; but it is the public service announcement posters from this time period that have been more noted than in many other periods of design. The simple, clean and graphic messages were, as with the music event posters, able to be understood by viewers with different languages.

Whether you deal with print or digital design, the lesson of Müller-Brockmann is for simplicity being more powerful than a mashup of too many elements. In a time of globalization with the web, it’s imperative that the message be simple and instantly understood by those with different languages and cultures. As with his poster designs, who could not get the message, seeing a speeding vehicle careening towards a small child?

Müller-Brockmann published several books, including The Graphic Artist and His Problems and Grid Systems in Graphic Design. These books provide an in-depth analysis of his work practices and philosophies, and provide an excellent insight for graphic designers wishing to learn more about the profession and creative thought. He spent most of his life working and teaching, even into the early 1990s when he toured the US and Canada speaking about his work.

Everybody has one: the inner critic that tells you you’re just faking it, that others have more talent, that you’ll never achieve the success you seek. The inner critic is an unconscious deterrent that stands between the seeds of great ideas and the fruits of achievement, making you hate your designs, giving you “writer’s block” as your deadline looms, keeping you stuck in a project’s initial thinking stage because something isn’t quite right. Denise Jacobs anatomizes and shows how to quash your inner critic, giving you the mental space and energy to let your true talents emerge.

A wonderfully simple site dedicated to the art and style of creating fine coffee. Learn how to use that Chemex properly!

Mystifying design with jargon only we understand makes us feel like heroes and creates a sense of job security. But it also creates an “us and them� atmosphere which excludes non-designers, obscures the true value of design, and generates antagonism when only cooperation will yield the best product. By revealing our process and inviting others into our world, we can create a team that is invested in the success of our work, and deliver better design. Jeff Gothelf discusses the steps we can take to increase the value of our practice and of ourselves as practitioners.

In recent years, it seems WordPress has been growing at an exponential rate. It’s also become a much better piece of software, almost becoming a transparent experience to the user, who can set up a beautiful, fully functional site or CMS in minutes. There are many user-focused sites that will help with the basics, but as you get further into WordPress, the list of reliable resources on more advanced topics grows thin. This presents an opportunity…

These days, cutting through the noise to find the quality content is a full-time job. Most of us are already working non-stop, so taking time to keep up on the ever-changing world of WordPress can be a challenge. I’ve spent countless hours searching through blog posts and forum threads looking for reliable, in-depth information on things like custom fields, image attachments, and post types. You know, those slices of WordPress wisdom that really provide some real-world, useful information.

WordPress: Then & Now

One of the strengths of WordPress is its very active development. Along with new features and goodies, each WordPress update aims to tighten security, optimize code, and squash bugs. There have been many updates since I first started using the platform back in 2005, and there have been some major steps along the way. For those of you who may be new to WordPress, here’s a snapshot comparing features then & now:

Feature	Old way of doing it (WP versions 1 & 2)	New way of doing it (WP version 3 +)
Updating the WordPress core	Download latest version, put up a maintenance page, remove old files, upload new files, remove maintenance page	Enter FTP info, click a button
Updating WordPress plugins and themes	Same thing: download new files, remove old files, manual upload	Enter FTP info, click a button
Tagging articles	Install and configure a plugin or two	Built-in functionality in the WP Admin
Replying to comments	Visit the actual comment thread to reply to comments	Respond to comments directly from the WP Admin
Saving revisions	As often as you could remember, select/copy all text, and paste into a text file and archive locally	Nothing. WP automatically keeps revisions of your work
Editing images	Open 3rd-party photo editor, make changes, save & upload file to WordPress	Log in and edit images directly in the WP Admin
Custom post types	Required all sorts of theme hacking	Add a line to functions.php
Post thumbnails	Custom fields to the rescue	Built-in functionality using simple code snippets and template tags
Multiple WP sites with a single install	Install and configure WP MU	Install and configure WordPress

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg – these are primarily functional improvements. Everything else about WordPress – performance, aesthetics, usability, and so on – continues to evolve and improve just as quickly.

Changing the Game

With WordPress’ phenomenal growth, we’ve seen an explosion in the amount of WordPress-related content available on the Web. There are plenty of beginner tutorials, round-up posts, and code snippets, but few good places to go for more advanced, in-depth content. With the new Smashing WordPress section, we’re aiming for quality articles on intermediate-level topics, with an emphasis on developing smarter, faster sites with the world’s most popular publishing platform.

We’ve been gathering a solid team of authors to share their techniques and experience as WordPress designers, developers, and users. We’ve got some incredible content on the way, with plenty of topics and ideas to explore as WordPress continues to evolve. By focusing on quality content and sharing real, hands-on experience, we’ve an opportunity to educate, inform, and help the community grow with WordPress.

The new WP section of Smashing Magazine will be covering many aspects of WordPress, at a deeper level, and geared toward a more intermediate audience. If you’re new to WordPress, that’s fine too – we’ve got a series of tutorials lined up that will get you up to speed on techniques we’ll be exploring in future articles.

It’s all about you! Let us know what you think – your comments and ideas inspire us to excel and improve this amazing thing that is Smashing Magazine. If you want to be on our growing team of authors and contribute to Smashing WordPress, contact us.

Welcome to the new WordPress section of Smashing Magazine!

About Our New Editor: Jeff Starr

Jeff has been developing and designing websites for over a decade, specializing in WordPress since 2005. He is the co-author of Digging into WordPress, and shares WordPress tips and techniques at Perishable Press, Digging into WordPress, and elsewhere. Over the years, he’s helped many people with WordPress and web development, and continues to serve the community at Monzilla Media.

Jeff’s recent work features a video/screencast series on Developing Secure WordPress Sites at Lynda.com, and exclusive WordPress articles in .net magazine.

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© Jeff Starr for Smashing Magazine, 2011.