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Urs Lehni

Awarded

Urs Lehni

'Books & Magazines', various print products

Graphic Design

Jury report

Infographic building sites
How is it pos­si­ble to dis­play a phe­nom­e­non as ab­stract as Swiss Fed­er­al­ism sim­ply and clearly? The graphic de­signer Urs Lehni was en­trusted with this task for a pub­li­ca­tion by the Avenir Su­isse press (NZZ-Ver­lag). Even the cover con­veys a sur­pris­ing state­ment about the par­celled na­ture of Switzer­land: the tini­est ad­min­is­tra­tive units are recorded on a map of the coun­try. This sup­pos­edly fa­mil­iar ma­te­r­ial al­most makes you dizzy in the form it is pre­sented here. The title 'Baustelle Föde­r­al­is­mus' is laid over this ad­min­is­tra­tive topog­ra­phy in such a way that it oc­cu­pies sev­eral dif­fer­ent lines. Sel­dom have such min­i­mal­is­tic re­sources been used to cre­ate such a high level of vi­sual stim­u­la­tion, so that a sub­ject as dif­fi­cult as this one can be ad­dressed. Nu­mer­ous in­fo­graph­ics and an in­de­pen­dent pic­to­r­ial sec­tion pro­vide the nec­es­sary clar­ity in this weighty pub­li­ca­tion, all 416 pages of it, so that read­ers can in­form them­selves bet­ter about this in­volved sub­ject mat­ter (the graphic art as­sis­tants were Su­sanne Gmür and Monika Stalder). This de­sign is so pleas­ingly ef­fort­less, in­for­ma­tive and clear that the label 'new sim­plic­ity' would seem en­tirely ap­pro­pri­ate.
This ver­sa­tile graphic de­signer, who trained at the Hochschule für Gestal­tung und Kunst Luzern, ad­dresses every pro­ject ap­pro­pri­ately de­spite his wide range of clients, and yet sus­tains a hand­writ­ing that is all his own. This can­not be com­pletely taken for granted, as his pro­jects range from books for the pres­ti­gious NZZ-Ver­lag to a mag­a­zine pro­ject he ini­ti­ated him­self, which is es­sen­tially a scene phe­nom­e­non. He is not just re­spon­si­ble for the graphic de­sign of the slim 'Our Mag­a­zine', which deals with every­day mat­ters and/or art, but also for the con­cept and the re­search (work­ing with Mar­tin Jäggi, Nick Wid­mer and Melanie Hof­mann). Is­sues on dogs 'Hund' and land­scape 'Land­schaft' have al­ready ap­peared, and we can await fur­ther num­bers of this mag­a­zine with eager an­tic­i­pa­tion.
Peter Stohler

Biography

Urs Lehni
Born in
1974
Education
Grafiker
Group name
Lehni-Trueb

Web

www.lehni-trueb.ch

also in

2010

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