---
name: New Wave design
slug: new-wave-design
category: aesthetic
status: published
created: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
modified: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
definition: "The postmodern break from Swiss order: stair-stepped rules,
  diagonal and letter-spaced type, weights mixed inside a word, and text
  reversed out of bars."
aliases:
  - name: Swiss punk
  - name: New Wave typography
  - name: Weingart style
    source: community
  - name: postmodern typography
tags:
  - editorial
  - retro
relations:
  contrastWith:
    - anti-design
    - grunge-design
    - swiss-style
  variantOf: []
  partOf: []
  seeAlso: []
implementations: []
sources:
  - title: "Hue and Eye: New Wave graphic design explained"
    url: https://www.hueandeye.org/new-wave-graphic-design/
  - title: "Wikipedia: Wolfgang Weingart"
    url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Weingart
demo: inline
exhibit: false
useWhen: the Swiss grid kept but deliberately violated
---

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](/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](/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](/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.