Karl Gerstner

Karl Gerstner is one of the foremost Swiss graphic designers. After withdrawing from active agency work, Gerstner designed the corporate identities for such companies as Swissair and worked as a worldwide identity consultant and designer for IBM. In Visual Language, Karl Gerstner recounts his 50 years of work as a graphic designer, vividly illustrating his professional ups and downs with samples of work, both realised and rejected by the client. Despite its didactic structure, the book's tone is never moralising; it is not Gerstner's intention to tell how it should be done, but rather how he did it. And, as with his other books (Designing Programmes soon became a cult book in the Sixties and Compendium for Literates was recently published in its fourth edition), Karl Gerstner has succeeded in creating an astute book that is guaranteed to become a timeless classic.