Carolin Beckmann

The final concept addresses the creative approach, designs and Otl Aicher’s countless quotes, statements and texts. The designer made many statements and, as well as communicating through his stylistic creations, also wrote books and gave interviews. What he produced continues to be applicable and relevant today. My set of illustrations seeks to celebrate and tap Aicher’s work without documenting or copying it. Highlighting the inspiration that designers and, indeed, others besides can still derive from Otl Aicher, his life, his views and his work in the world of today is, instead, simply an act of acknowledgment. Which is why I addressed myself to his approach to design, his style and above all his thoughts. Aicher was a person who had a great thirst for knowledge, read a lot, asked questions and did even more thinking.

This enabled him to arrive at a comprehensive view of the world and to make well-founded statements on a variety of issues. I studied him in depth, intent above all on not only making use of his most familiar and famous utterances. I was also on the lookout for things he said that leave plenty of room for interpretation.

I choreographed these quotes by various artistic means, partly graphically and wholly in the spirit of direct communication design, and also in part in a manner that was at odds with Aicher’s belief that art and design don’t sit well together. Many of his statements are ambiguous and would not have carried so much force given clear design, hence I adopted a rather more artistic approach to some of his works.

Otl Aicher consciously avoided the colour red in the visual identity he conceived for the 1972 Olympic Games, for example, especially in combination with white and black, so as to rule out any correlation with the Nazis’ swastika flag. This underlines just how much other areas and in particular politics influenced his work.

I adhered to Otl Aicher’s palette of colours, specifically light and dark blue, light and dark green, orange and solar yellow. I used various gradations and degrees of suffusion in the cause of greater design latitude and modernity. The slightly coarse texture creates a stylish look.

Black and white are added for greater contrast and to increase the number of possible permutations. Aicher also produced a lot of his designs in black-and-white, so I did without colour altogether in some of my own works.

Finding interesting quotes that also resonate with the modern mindset and give pause for thought was easy. It proved more difficult, however, to select quotes that could be visualised well and yielded value-added in the process.

Some quotes immediately gave me a few ideas, whereas for others I had to think long and hard. A number of quotes spoke for themselves and did not need to be portrayed pictorially. The quotes were meant to inspire and leave room for interpretation.

My favourite quote is probably the most straightforward yet cryptical: “No, on foot.” My reading of this quote, which Aicher used several times in his book Gehen in der Wüste, is that there are things one has to tackle in the most straightforward and nevertheless most difficult way. Progress is more arduous, more strenuous and slower on foot. On the other hand, no auxiliary resources are required, there’s plenty to see as you go along and time enough to take it all in. I can only conjecture that Aicher applied these words to the act of design, whereas I apply them to the process that underlies it.

We often make things much too difficult for ourselves, think too much and rely on technology. The quote recalls the merits of simply returning to our roots, taking in our surroundings, looking about and then beginning with pencil and paper or simply in our heads. That takes time and that’s alright. We’re out and about on foot, after all.

I wanted a format that was straightforward and easy to handle. At the same time, it needed to be big enough to represent specific details in the illustrations as well as enabling quotes to be read from some distance. Given that the remit involved producing something that could, for instance, be placed on a table as opposed to posters that need to be legible at a distance of several yards, I essentially went for a standard A4 format.

I reduced the height of the document to 270 mm (10⅔”) and kept to 210 mm (8¼”) for the width, as this is useful for operating with binder clips or spiral binding. There was no clear notion at this stage of how the final product would look and a standard document width provided scope for a greater number of options.

I had various ideas for titles. They all involved the play of opposites, the contrast between typeface and imagery, for example, or the differing vintages of Aicher’s older Rotis and the modern Katarine font. It was only once the entire work inclusive of the cover design had been completed that I opted for the title “much to say, more to show”. The reason for this in my opinion was that, as well as identifying two means of communication, it is also a further allusion to Aicher’s character. He was a designer, hence that was the agency through which he communicated in the first instance.

He nevertheless also had much to say and did so in his books, for instance. Otl Aicher demonstrated that it is possible to be good in something (to show = to design) without neglecting other things (to say = to develop opinions on other topics). As a further minor tribute, I additionally adopted Aicher’s archetypal “radical lowercase” for the cover. I opted for a barely notional blue shirt, with red and white pens and matching font colours. Blue is a typical colour for shirts that has a congenial quality without being as professional or widespread as a white shirt would have been.

I initially sought to compile the illustrations in a book, but feared it might become one of those books you leaf through once and then consign to your bookcase for posterity. I’m very interested in poster design anyway at the moment, so this was a form of production that greatly attracted me.

In the end, I went for something midway between a book and a poster, a kind of pocket calendar measuring 210 x 270 mm (8¼ x 10⅔ inches) and thus large enough to be a real eyecatcher. My aim was to create a board that, as well as standing upright, can also be folded down for conveyance purposes.

I used a model in stiff paper to investigate which shapes would be stable standing up whilst also being flexibly collapsible. I replaced the spiral binding commonly used for calendars with binder clips, since the latter have a more minimalist, high-quality and modern impact. They are more durable, moreover.

I ended up getting together with a packaging designer to conceive the board. We started by building a model in grey cardboard for function-testing purposes, whereafter the flipchart was produced. I chose thick paper for the illustrations and had the front laminated. Frequent fingering and turning of pages made of lighter paper might cause them to tear at the clips or become dog-eared.

The thin laminate coating keeps the paper cleaner and gleamingly white, furthermore, and lends it a discreet, high-quality gloss. Use was made of black cardboard 2 mm (0.8”) thick which I scored in such a way that it could be folded and carried around like a folder. I was most intent, however, on ensuring it could be straightforwardly and securely placed upright.

It would be possible to manufacture large quantities of the show card economically and sustainably, since it merely comprises a single piece of cardboard. The Velcro fasteners on the back impart added stability. The dark cardboard used as a passepartout contrasted nicely with the illustrations. These are held in place by two large metal binder clips that have been inserted into the upper edge to facilitate straightforward turning of the pages.

The project gave me an opportunity to emerge from my comfort zone, i.e. to forego minimalism, line art, “handwritten fonts” based on Helvetica and reliance on images. What transpired instead was something colourful, old and inspired, something new and different, above all something illustrated.

I used a lot of things I’d never used before, knowing full well I could deliver what I had decided to forego and that it would work – partly because it’s currently fashionable and accordingly meets with most people’s spontaneous approval.

Aicher’s conceptions, by contrast, are less explanatory and minimalist: more colours, more shapes, more of another age.

So strict were Otl Aicher’s own views and rules that he would have been unlikely to endorse everything in this tribute to him. But that’s precisely what design is all about: communicating things so they are understood. And if even a single person understands any of these quotes better or differently, my aim with this work will have been achieved.