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Laurenz Brunner

Awarded

Laurenz Brunner

Font 'Akkurat'

Graphic Design

Jury report

Exactly between tradition and modernisation
Vi­sual de­signer Lau­renz Brun­ner, trained at the Ri­etveld Acad­e­mie in Am­s­ter­dam and at the Cen­tral St. Mar­tin's Col­lege in Lon­don, has de­vel­oped a new type­face. The sans-serif 'Akku­rat' refers to the tra­di­tion of Swiss sans-serif type­faces and de­spite all so­bri­ety and so­lid­ity ra­di­ates an ap­peal­ing op­ti­mism. Sim­ple and un­ob­tru­sive at first sight, it re­veals only on closer at­ten­tion how much re­search and de­tail it con­tains. Lau­renz Brun­ner de­signed the type­face 'Akku­rat' dur­ing his year in Lon­don in 2002/2003. After many pre­lim­i­nary drafts he painted the let­ters by hand with acrylic colour on A4-sheets, as he de­scribes in a brochure. 'Akku­rat', now dis­trib­uted by the type­face label 'Lineto.​com' and avail­able in eight ser­ra­tions from light to black is ev­i­dence of Lau­renz Brun­ner's play­ful in­ter­ac­tion with the legacy of mod­ernist type­face de­sign. The pub­li­ca­tion 'Beauty and the Book – 60 years 'The most beau­ti­ful Swiss books'' pub­lished in 2004 by the Fed­eral Of­fice of Cul­ture used ex­clu­sively 'Akku­rat' or 'Akku­rat mono' re­spec­tively and shows how well the text flows with this new type­face. That it can also be used for larger text has been shown with the poster for the ex­hi­bi­tion 'Frische Schriften' in the Mu­seum für Gestal­tung Zürich. The poster edi­tion des­gined by Lau­renz Brun­ner for the 'Diplom­schau 2005' at the Ri­etveld Acad­e­mie also uses 'Akku­rat' in its bold ver­sion, sup­ple­mented by var­i­ous ac­cen­tu­a­tions and non-west­ern type­faces. The colour­ful va­ri­ety of lan­guages and peo­ples at the Am­s­ter­dam art school is vi­su­al­ized with an over­lap of type­face- and colour lay­ers in a sim­ple but very ef­fec­tive way and si­mul­ta­ne­ously time ties in with the tra­di­tion of the ty­po­graph­i­cally de­signed poster. Each of the 21 type­faces is as­signed to a colour and with 2 to 21 print­ing processes over 100 vari­a­tions of this poster were cre­ated. Lau­renz Brun­ner be­longs to a younger gen­er­a­tion of de­sign­ers – this year par­tic­u­larly well rep­re­sented by Sibylle Hag­mann and Aurèle Sack – who liven up ty­pog­ra­phy with new and fresh im­pulses and man­age to carry out a bal­anc­ing act be­tween tra­di­tion and mod­erni­sa­tion.
Peter Stohler

Biography

Laurenz Brunner
Born in
1980
Education
Grafikdesigner

also in

2012

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