Jonas Voegeli

Awarded

Jonas Voegeli

Six publications

Graphic Design

Books that Speak Volumes
For his pre­sen­ta­tion of six books Jonas Voegeli is awarded a Swiss Fed­eral De­sign Grant for the sec­ond time since 2003. It was a pre­sen­ta­tion in the true sense of the word: the books that he de­signed were metic­u­lously arranged to form a small black and white cube on the table, sur­mounted by six pa­per­backs of dif­fer­ent sizes no less metic­u­lously wrapped in white paper dust­jack­ets – along with a lit­tle book pub­lished by Rowohlt with the promis­ing title 'Guten Tag wie geht es so' ['Good day how are things going'].
This is a good way to start study­ing Jonas Voegeli's cre­ative ap­proach. No colour: just white paper. What do we see if there are no clues to guide us, if we know noth­ing of the con­tents or if the con­tents mean noth­ing to us? We might delve into the books straight away – and risk not get­ting very far – or we might take stock of the books them­selves, their for­mat, weight and cover. The tac­tile qual­ity be­comes im­por­tant and gives a first im­pres­sion of what the be­holder might ex­pect to find within.
Voegeli in­vari­ably uses for­mats in the pro­por­tions 2:3, 3:4 and 4:5. Type­face and lay­out are de­signed to un­der­pin the dra­matic struc­ture of the con­tents. It is here that Voegeli shows a con­sum­mate mas­tery of his craft. For the pub­li­ca­tion 'Wo-Wo-Wonige!', a doc­toral the­sis on de­vel­op­ments in urban and hous­ing poli­cies and ac­tivist move­ments in Zurich since 1968, he de­vel­oped an in­ge­nious sys­tem of link­ing and cross-ref­er­enc­ing text, im­ages, foot­notes and ap­pen­dices. The bold ty­pog­ra­phy un­der­lines the top­ics cov­ered in the book.
Time and again, Voegeli man­ages to cre­ate strik­ing de­signs for books deal­ing with com­plex is­sues that would not seem at first sight to ap­peal to the mass mar­ket. For in­stance, 'LINZ ATLAS zur Leben­squalität hier und an­der­swo' (in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Dim­itri Bro­quard) pre­sents sta­tis­tics, di­a­grams and charts with such vi­sual va­ri­ety and im­pact that it is a plea­sure to browse and learn about the qual­ity of life 'here and else­where'. Only mar­gin­ally smaller and thin­ner than the stan­dard Swiss school atlas, the cover and for­mat of the book speak vol­umes: this is clearly a ref­er­ence work, with a durable, lam­i­nated cover that tells us it is a book de­signed for a life­time of use and en­joy­ment.
And should any­one ask how things are going for Jonas Voegeli's books, the an­swer is ob­vi­ous: very well in­deed, thank you!
Pa­trizia Criv­elli

Jonas Voegeli
Born in
1979
Education
Designer FH, Studienbereich Visuelle Kommunikation