Karl Gerstner

Karl Gerstner

Graphic designer, advertiser and typographer, Basel

Karl Ger­st­ner is a graphic de­signer and a sig­nif­i­cant Swiss ex­po­nent of ty­pog­ra­phy. In the 1960s, he stud­ied at the Gewerbeschule Basel under Emil Ruder. His role as co-founder of the ad­ver­tis­ing agency GGK (Ger­st­ner, Gredinger and Kut­ter) has re­sulted in his work being seen around the world. The GGK has long been one of Switzer­land's best-known ad­ver­tis­ing agen­cies. Ger­st­ner's pi­o­neer­ing work – in par­tic­u­lar, his de­signs for Geigy, based in Basel - makes him one of the most im­por­tant ex­po­nents of mod­ern com­mer­cial graphic de­sign in Switzer­land. Ger­st­ner's best-known work in­cludes his book ′Pro­gramme En­twer­fen′, pub­lished in 1963 – con­tain­ing four es­says, in which he ex­plains the basic prin­ci­ples of his de­sign method. In­stead of set­ting out step-by-step for­mu­las, the book pro­vides a uni­ver­sal sys­tem for de­vel­op­ing in­di­vid­ual so­lu­tions, an­tic­i­pat­ing tech­no­log­i­cal de­vel­op­ments at the very be­gin­ning of the com­puter age. His pre­ma­ture legacy has been housed in the Graph­ics col­lec­tion at the Swiss Na­tional Li­brary since 2006. The Swiss Con­fed­er­a­tion is ho­n­our­ing Karl Ger­st­ner for his pi­o­neer­ing role in Swiss graphic de­sign – a phe­nom­e­non whose in­flu­ence has ex­tended far be­yond Switzer­land.