Swiss Poster Explorations The starting point

Swiss Poster Explorations

The starting point for each series was a source problem: what happens when you take material that already has its own visual logic Blossfeldt's botanical photographs, Soviet constructivist geometry, a record label's back catalog and subject it to the strict horizontal and vertical of the Swiss grid?

The four series were made without a brief. The Plantstudie posters pair Karl Blossfeldt's 1928 plant studies with the compositional principles of Armin Hofmann, a single block of flat color interrupting the image at a different height each time. The Atlantic Records work asks what the label's identity might look like if it had been designed in Zurich rather than New York. The geometric series works the other direction entirely: pure form, no photography, a palette of rust, ochre, and teal arranged on a grid that becomes increasingly hard to ignore.

The halftone work came last, and pushed furthest. Photography as raw material rather than subject. Color as punctuation rather than atmosphere.