As Far As I Can Tell

On Thursday I attended a lecture by design legend Wolfgang Weingart at Western. He taught at the famed Basel School of Design in Switzerland while it was the epicenter for graphic design’s coming of age. It’s interesting to hear from someone who remembers the transition from hot metal to film based typography. From the sounds of things he never really made the jump to the computer. He was an early experimenter with it in Europe, though his examples where nearly all film based.

His history is important to understand, particularly since he educated one of my professors from the program at WMU. The lecture was good for historical reasons, though I can’t say that I took much inspiration from it. His lesson seemed to be “have fun” and the process he shared was getting a bottle of wine and then designing. He talked a lot about his sketches and experimentation, but I would have liked some more insight into his methods, like maybe a case study of a particular project.

No doubt it’s very hard to give a lecture about your life in an hour, especially when English isn’t your first language. Luckily for the design students at Western he was here all week, giving workshops and advice in a more direct manner.