Helmut Schmid: Design is Attitude

Helmut Schmid is an Austrian designer who studied under Emil Ruder, Kurt Hauert and Robert Buchler at the Basel School of Design. He’s known as a typographer and graphic designer. Designing visual identities and product identities with beautiful compositions using either black and white or a single colour, predominantly with black and white text, though on the bottle packaging he utilizes the colour of the drink as the text colour. He combines the clarity of the Swiss Style with a Japanese aesthetic of eliminating clutter. There’s a clarity and an intelligent simplicity in all his pieces.

He is perhaps best known for the bi-lingual packaging identity for Otsuka Pharmaceutical packaging. Schmid Today is a brilliant online digital archive of his projects, exhibition and new book. I like his inspirational quote below and totally agree that Design is Attitude!

“It is not coincidence that makes a designer but his continuity. And continuity means working and searching, working and fighting, working and finding, finding and seeing, seeing and communicating, and again working and searching. Designers must challenge the past, must challenge the present, must challenge the future; but first of all, designers must be true to themselves. Design is attitude.” ~ Helmut Schmid, Design is Attitude 2007

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