Otl Aicher. A Personal Experience

Title: Otl Aicher. A Personal Experience
Speaker: Yves Zimmermann, graphic designer

The designer Yves Zimmermann, editor of all of Otl Aicher’s books in Spanish, published by Gustavo Gili, will talk about his relationship with the founder of the HfG.

An account of some events experienced with him in person, of other events related to the translation and publication of a number of his books in Castilian, and also of shared memories of youth, of the Second World War, of watching air battles, and so on, which he too had seen and lived through very directly.

Otl Aicher is undoubtedly one of the great personalities of twentieth- century graphic design, and also as a designer-thinker, as witnessed by his extensive bibliography. His critical thinking manifests itself in many of his writings not only in the field of design as such but also in other areas of reflection, in which he always showed a fine awareness of the difference between theoretical thought and practical thinking, and the difference between the digital world and the analogue world.

Profile
Originally from Basel, he has lived in Barcelona since 1961. He trained at the Allgemeine Gewerbeschule Basel design school, and started out in the profession working in Bill Burtin’s Visual Research and Design studio, and subsequently in the architect Ulrich Franze’s studio in New York. From 1962 to 1966 he taught graphic design at the Elisava school. He started his first design studio in 1968, and in 1988 went on to found Zimmermann Associates, which specializes in corporate identity and packaging projects.

He received the National Design Award from the Fundació BCD Foundation and the Spanish Ministry of Industry and Energy in 1995 and an Aster Communication Award in 1998-99. He is the author of the book Del Diseño (1998), a series of reflections on various aspects of design, published by Editorial Gustavo Gili. He is the editor of the GG Design collection published by Editorial Gustavo Gili.