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Stephan Müller

Awarded

Stephan Müller

Various publications

Graphic Design

Jury report

Respect for the text
How do you de­sign a book about the Palace of the Re­pub­lic in Berlin that fo­cuses on its ar­chi­tec­ture and the way it is em­bed­ded in the his­tory of the GDR? The graphic artist and book de­signer Stephan Müller re­al­ized an aus­tere-look­ing cover and a highly in­di­vid­ual con­cept for the pub­li­ca­tion 'Ein Palast und seine Re­pub­lik' (2001). When choos­ing a graphic grid he turned, al­most like a de­sign re­searcher, to a type of mod­ern lay­out that was wide­spread in the GDR. When choos­ing the font he also fol­lowed the GDR graphic de­sign of the pe­riod and opted for 'Hel­vetica', which was one of the type­faces most used in the GDR days, against the back­ground of its ra­tio­nal­ism and func­tion­al­ism. And to go the whole way with the con­cept, there had to be some red on the cover. This had 'sup­ported the state' to an ex­tent in the GDR, said the de­signer when com­ment­ing on his choice of colour. The ex­cit­ing fea­ture of this book is pre­cisely that the de­sign is aus­tere and mod­ern, and con­trasts starkly with the pic­to­r­ial sec­tion. A large num­ber of pho­tographs record the lav­ish in­te­rior of the GDR Palace, scat­ter­ing an in­sis­tent East­ern chic around them.
Stephan Müller has often won awards in the 'Most Beau­ti­ful Swiss Books' com­pe­ti­tion over his work­ing years, and also re­ceived the Fed­eral De­part­ment of Cul­ture's Jan-Tschi­chold Prize. He al­ways man­ages to find the ap­pro­pri­ate vi­sual lan­guage for each pro­ject, and to show great re­spect in his treat­ment of the text. Stephan Müller also likes de­vis­ing sign sys­tems and fonts (he and Cor­nel Windlin have been run­ning the Lineto font label since 1998). A glance at a pub­li­ca­tion he de­signed, 'Ter­ror und der Krieg gegen ihn', for ex­am­ple, where essay texts are con­fronted with pages of pic­tograms, shows that sign sys­tems also take on a life of their own in his work, ef­fec­tively be­com­ing im­ages in their own right.
Peter Stohler

Biography

Stephan Müller
Born in
1965
Education
Graphic Designer

also in

2013

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