Institut für Gestaltung
Abteilung Visuelle Kommunikation
Wintersemester 2026 / 27

Lecture series № 12
Aula, Hauptgebäude
Free admission, 19:30

Form Follows Function?

Six evenings on the grid, the typeface and the argument. Designers, historians and engineers ask whether the modernist promise still holds when the page has become a screen and the screen has become everything.

• 14.10 Anouk Weidmann Grids as Ethics — Basel School of Design

  Weidmann traces the modular grid from Müller-Brockmann's concert posters to design-system tokens, arguing that the grid was never a cage but a contract between designer and reader.

• 28.10 Tobias Renner The Neutral Letter — Type historian, Zürich

  How did Helvetica become invisible? Renner unpacks the myth of neutrality, from the 1957 Haas specimen to the sans-serifs shipped inside every operating system today.

• 11.11 Priya Natarajan Systems Over Screens — Interface engineer, Bengaluru

  An engineer's view of layout: constraint solvers, flex algorithms and why the 12-column grid survived the transition to fluid, container-aware interfaces almost untouched.

• 25.11 Marek Zieliński Red on White — Poster archivist, Warsaw

  A single accent colour carries the whole argument. Zieliński compares the Swiss red with the Polish poster school and asks what restraint costs and what it buys.

• 09.12 Helene Baur The Ragged Edge — Book designer, Leipzig

  Flush-left, ragged-right: Baur reads the unjustified paragraph as a moral stance, an honesty about word spacing that justified text was designed to conceal.

• 16.12 Roundtable All speakers — moderated by the Institute

  Closing discussion and a live critique of student posters submitted during the semester. Questions from the floor are expected, encouraged and occasionally answered.