Elements, Realisation
Text: Otl Aicher, Sepp Landsbek, Jürgen W. Braun
Published in 1995 by: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne
ISBN 3-88375-197-9

10 years after our first meeting with Otl Aicher we published, jointly with Sepp Landsbek, all materials on visual communication that we had gathered during our many years of cooperation with Rotis.

From 1985 to 1990, Otl Aicher had spent five years with us, polishing the elements of our visual image. At long last we were allowed to present this image in the form of a handbook to the general public on January 1, 1990. Another five years later, we had elaborated the design elements to such an extent that we were able to illustrate the original ideas with a large number of practical examples.

The book "Visual Communication" was not written for our own benefit. It was designed as a store of visual examples for those students of architecture, design and graphic art who had attentively followed our journey into the world of design management and again and again asked us for publication of a summary. Finally, a small textbook was compiled, with theory derived from practical experience.

Insiders will notice that Otl Aicher recommended to us his Traffic script for the title and Trade Gothic as general corporate script, although he himself was working intensively on developing his own Rotis script at the time. Since then, we have often wondered why he did not allow us to wait for his Rotis script. Otl Aicher took the answer to this question with him to the grave. In hindsight, however, we are very grateful to him for this move, since the enormous success of his Rotis script in placard advertising could have cost us some of our East Westphalian intimacy and provincial humility. We are still satisfied with the combination of Traffic as a clear script for headlines and Trade Gothic as our compact bread-and-butter script.