ZURICH. In the design studios of Zurich's Kreis 5, the strangest revival of the season is pinned to the walls: strict column grids, generous white space, sans-serif type set flush left and ragged right. A generation of designers raised on the chaotic freedom of the digital canvas is rediscovering the Swiss grid, the severest and most influential design system the country ever exported. The return is quiet, deliberate and, by the standards of fashion, almost defiant.
The evidence is everywhere once you look. Book covers from Zurich and Lausanne publishers have regained their disciplined asymmetry; cultural posters for the season's theatres and museums are set on visible grids again; even websites, the natural home of the endless scroll, are being rebuilt on column systems their designers' grandfathers would recognise. The grid, pronounced dead a dozen times, has outlived its obituarists.
The original system was forged in the 1950s, in the studios and the design schools of Zurich and Basel, where the International Typographic Style turned order into an ethic. Its bible, a treatise on grid systems published in the early 1980s, never really went out of print; it went out of fashion, buried by the grunge and deconstruction of the 1990s, when breaking the grid was the whole point. What is happening now is less nostalgia than rehabilitation.
The revival has a commercial logic that its pioneers would recognise. Clients in finance, pharma and the cultural sector, the backbone of Swiss design practice, are paying for clarity again after a decade of visual noise, and a grid system is, among other things, a way of billing for discipline. The Museum für Gestaltung in Zurich does brisk business in the classics of the style, and the design schools report their typography courses oversubscribed.
The institutions of the revival are the descendants of the institutions of the original. The Basel design school where the style was codified still teaches the grid as grammar before licence; ECAL in Lausanne and the Zurich University of the Arts have made type design a flagship; and independent foundries such as Lineto and Grilli Type sell Swiss-made typefaces to the world from studios a few tram stops apart. The ecosystem, in other words, never left.
Critical reaction divides along predictable lines. Detractors call the revival a comfort blanket, a retreat into a certified Swiss past at the very moment design ought to be looking elsewhere. Its defenders reply that the grid was never about nostalgia: it is a tool for making information honest, and its return says more about the present's confusion than about any affection for the 1950s.
The teachers are the least sentimental of all. “The grid is not a cage, it is a promise to the reader,” says a Basel design tutor who has watched three revivals come and go. The students, she adds, understand this faster than their elders did.
The irony at the heart of the story is that the most Swiss of styles was never really national. It was designed from the start to cross borders, and it did: the visual identities of railways, airports and half the world's corporations descend from it, and Switzerland's own four-language public notices remain its quiet masterpiece. The current revival is being watched, and imitated, in London, Seoul and New York.
The season ahead will give the trend its public face. A major exhibition at the Museum für Gestaltung traces the grid from the poster to the pixel, a new monograph gathers the surviving pioneers with their digital heirs, and a series of open workshops invites the public to set type by hand, an experience that tends to make converts.
The deeper meaning of the return is not about type at all. In an information culture drowning in noise, the oldest Swiss design virtue, the idea that clarity is a form of respect, has acquired a new urgency. The grid is back because the chaos it was invented to tame has come back first.
In a print shop off Hardstrasse, a young designer pulls a fresh poster from the press and holds it to the light. The columns align; the margins hold; the tram timetable on the wall behind her, set on the same principles sixty years ago, keeps perfect time.