Gebr. Fretz AG Zürich
Herbert Matter’s eight-page brochure for the printing company Gebruder Fretz AG is a striking and innovative piece of design that contributed greatly to Graphic Design and its step forward within technology to get it where it is today in modern times. It provides a source-book of print examples, which demonstrate how recent advances in offset lithography and gravure allowed complex arrangements of graphic and pictorial elements, ideas that had not been elaborated before.
Back in the day, certain compositions of imagery and text had been impracticable with letterpress printing. Now photographic images could be masked, framed and arranged in new ways — even combined with textual and other graphic characteristics. Upcoming print technology at the time recognised the power of the image, as well as the possibilities of the fresh visual language that emerged later in the 1920s and 30s, in which the spatial organisation of elements provided structure and dynamism. This synthesis of qualities reflected Matter’s own broad range of experiences: a photographer, painter and filmmaker as well as a graphic designer, Matter had worked alongside leading figures in art and design, including Fernand Léger and A. M. Cassandre.
What is immediately striking about the brochure is that images determine where the text is placed, rather than the layout being dominated by columns of the text (the norm at the time). We progress through the printing processes via a sequence of black-and-white images that winds its way through the brochure, leading the eye to blocks of text. In addition to skewed frames, some images are rotated so that they no longer align with the vertical or horizontal axis, and many are masked or dropped out of their background. A number are also displayed as vignettes, which fade out into the white of the page, and black-and-white photographs or line drawings occasionally over-print monochrome images, producing a layered effect. Rather than just an exercise in hollow virtuosity, such interventions reveal the connections that could be made between images.
Matter’s exploration of the potential of print to frame and blend photographic imagery resonates with work produces some five decades later, when the arrival of digital technology made these effects still easier to achieve.
