New Wave design

It starts with one teacher and one school. Wolfgang Weingart arrived at the Basel design school in the late 1960s trained in hot metal, and began doing things to the International Style that its own practitioners considered vandalism: letterspacing display type until the word came apart, stepping a rule’s weight in stages across a page, setting lines at angles, mixing weights inside a single word, reversing text out of solid bars, and overprinting halftone fields until the layers argued with each other. His students carried it out of Switzerland, most visibly April Greiman in Los Angeles and Dan Friedman in New York, and by the early 1980s the register had a name and a decade of commercial work behind it.

The contrast with swiss-style is not opposition, which is what makes it worth learning properly. Swiss style uses the grid so that the grid disappears: everything aligns, the type is one family at a few sizes, and the reader is meant to notice the content and nothing else. New Wave keeps the same grid and makes you watch it get broken, so the columns are often still there and visible, and the interest comes from a headline stepping off them, a rule changing weight mid-run, or a block set fifteen degrees off true. Remove the grid entirely and the work stops being New Wave and starts being noise, because a violation needs something to violate.

Two neighbours on this site sit close. Memphis-design is the same decade’s rebellion in the object world, and the two share a palette instinct and a taste for deliberate ugliness, but Memphis works in drawn shapes and pattern while New Wave is fundamentally a typographic argument. Halftone is a technique the register raids constantly, since a coarse dot screen enlarged past the point of legibility gives you a texture, a grey, and a reference to the printing process all at once, and layering two of them out of register is a Weingart move rather than an accident.

On a screen the register translates better than most because so much of it is type and rules, both of which are cheap. Letterspacing is a property, stepped rules are a stack of divs at different heights, and a rotation is one transform. The traps are the usual ones with a volume knob attached. Heavily letterspaced display type has to be exempted from the accessible name or the screen reader spells it out. Rotated text is unselectable in practice and often unreadable at small sizes, so keep it to display sizes and duplicate the content somewhere flat. And the whole register is a poster idiom: it works on a landing page, a title sequence, or an event site, and it fights every scanning habit a form or a table depends on.