This is the 18^th Didacta/Eurodidac Worldformat poster for the convention on teaching aids. Wolfgang Weingart created designs for numerous books, catalogs and posters in his career, this series notably being for cultural and educational institutions. He remained one to test and experiment with new ways to “break” Swiss typography, and he took exploration very seriously. His analysis of layout compositions allowed him to play with layering through color and film, leading to some of his more energetic designs. As one who preferred to be involved in the entire design process, this allowed him more and more opportunity for experimentation. He developed new techniques to create iconic images, such as the use of halftone screens and benday films used in photomechanical processes. One of these techniques was the use of the repro camera, which is a large, vertically oriented camera used for copying and enlarging graphics with half-tone and dot-screen elements. This is significant as the camera wasn’t generally used for this practice, and thus was considered a revolutionary method. And yet, it perfectly encapsulates the progressive and creative spirit that Weingart sought to pursue in his graphic design work. Weingart used this camera to stretch, blur, and cut type, which was considered a new approach to attaching continuous-tone images and letters. He would claim his design process relied only on manipulating the film and colors he layered. One can see this process reflected in this poster, as well as in the other black and white world-format posters that he designed between 1976 and 1979 (with an additional series of color posters created between 1980 and 1983).

 

Sources:

https://www.antikvariat.net/en/mor4930-18-didacta-eurodidac-weingart-wolfgang-antikvariat-morris

https://web.archive.org/web/20160307003330/http://nladams.com/ch_supp.pdf

https://www.aiga.org/medalist-wolfgang-weingart