The Greatest Designers of our Age #2: Josef Müller-Brockmann

The man who built the grid

Open almost any well-designed website, annual report or magazine and you are looking at the work of Josef Müller-Brockmann, even if you’ve never heard his name. The invisible grid that lines up the columns, the generous white space, the clean sans serif type set flush left: much of it traces back to a Swiss designer working in Zurich in the 1950s. That’s why he is number two in this series, right after Dieter Rams.

Where Rams designed objects, Müller-Brockmann designed order on a flat page. His posters look as fresh now as the day they were pasted up, and his books are still on the shelves of design students everywhere.

Early life

Josef Müller-Brockmann was born in Rapperswil, Switzerland, on 9 May 1914. He studied architecture, design and the history of art at the University of Zurich and at Zurich’s Kunstgewerbeschule, the school of arts and crafts, and served an apprenticeship with the designer and advertising consultant Walter Diggelmann. In 1936 he opened his own studio in Zurich, working on illustration, exhibition design and stage sets.

His early work was illustrative and decorative, full of drawn figures. It took him the next fifteen years to strip all that away and arrive at the style he became famous for.

The Tonhalle posters

The breakthrough came with his posters for the Zurich Tonhalle concert hall, from the early 1950s onwards, including the musica viva series of contemporary music concerts. Instead of pictures of musicians or instruments, Müller-Brockmann used pure geometry: arcs, circles, bars and lines arranged on a strict grid, with the concert details set in clean, small type. The shapes don’t illustrate the music; they behave like it, with rhythm, tension and harmony.

They are still some of the most copied posters in design history. Every time you see a minimal music festival poster built from bold shapes and tidy type, you are looking at the children of the Tonhalle series.

Posters with a public job

Müller-Brockmann also designed public posters for the Swiss Automobile Club and others, and they show the style working hard for a message. His road safety poster Schützt das Kind! (Protect the child!) from 1953 puts a photograph of a small child in the path of a motorcyclist, sharply cropped. His Weniger Lärm (Less noise) poster from 1960 shows a figure clutching their head, the words set at a sharp angle. No decoration, no jokes, nothing to get between the viewer and the point.

The Swiss Style

Müller-Brockmann became one of the leading figures of what is now called the Swiss Style, or the International Typographic Style. Its rules are easy to list and hard to master:

A mathematical grid that organises everything on the page.
Sans serif type such as Akzidenz-Grotesk, usually set flush left and ragged right.
Objective photography rather than drawn illustration.
Asymmetric layouts with plenty of white space.
Information first: the design serves the message, not the designer’s ego.

In 1958 he co-founded the journal Neue Grafik with Richard Paul Lohse, Hans Neuburg and Carlo Vivarelli, which carried the Swiss approach to designers around the world. He also taught at the Zurich school of arts and crafts, and from 1967 he worked as a European design consultant for IBM, a company that already understood what disciplined design could do for a brand.

The books

Müller-Brockmann wrote down his methods, which is a big part of why they spread. The Graphic Artist and His Design Problems (1961), A History of Visual Communication (1971) and, most famous of all, Grid Systems in Graphic Design (1981) are still in print. The grid book is a manual, not a manifesto: page after page of how to divide a space into fields and use them consistently, from posters to books to corporate identity.

He died in Unterengstringen, near Zurich, on 30 August 1996. His wife, Shizuko Yoshikawa, was a respected artist and designer in her own right.

What Müller-Brockmann teaches a brand

Use a system, not a mood. A grid isn’t a cage; it’s a promise that every page, post and flyer will feel like it came from the same place. Small businesses rarely lose customers because their logo isn’t clever enough. They lose trust because every flyer, menu and social post looks different.

Let the type do the talking. Müller-Brockmann could build a poster from a few lines of well-set text. For a brand, that means picking one or two typefaces and using them consistently, with clear sizes for headings and body text.

White space is not wasted space. Crowded designs look cheap and are hard to read. Room to breathe makes a small business look confident and established.

Geometry carries emotion. His concert posters prove that a circle, an arc and a bar can feel like music. A simple geometric mark can feel like your business too, without needing a literal picture of a cupcake or a spanner.

The grid at Zenn

Zenn’s templates are built on the same thinking. Every Brand kit design sits on a grid, so your logo, colours and fonts land in the right place on business cards, social posts, presentations and letterheads, and change together when you change your brand. Start with your name in the logo maker and you’ll see the system at work: one brand, laid out with care, everywhere it appears.

Next in the series: #3, Saul Bass.