I think it would be hard to be a Swiss designer: everyone expects you to use Helvetica and consistently blow their typography out of the water. When I was in Mexico, every street vendor we passed tried to sell us Cuban cigars, knowing most Americans don’t know that the word “Cuban” in relation to a cigar does not mean “perfect.” After all, there are good Cuban cigars and there are bad Cuban cigars.

Some Swiss design firms are great, others are horrible. After all, surely even Switzerland has horrid flyers and posters from its own tourist traps like Las Vegas and Branson, with badly masked out people (and hair), huge red/yellow letters, bold areas of type ripping through the typography like machine gun bullets fired by marketing people. I know that even in Switzerland, where the Graphic Design gods lounge around on long couches eating grapes, there are marketing machine gunners. I know it.

I was impressed the other day by an excellent Swiss design firm: Contreforme. Contreforme is not one of the bad Swiss design groups, but they’re not gods either, and I think that’s what I like most about them. Contreforme is good, but they’re approachable: you can tell they deal with some of the same issues you and I deal with. Client interference, client spouses, short deadlines that prevent fully executing the design. Consider these two designs:

I think the illustration on the front cover here has great energy and strength/movement of line. In the spread, the right page is excellent, from the orange callout, to the image, to the type block pulling the eye into that image. Plus, look at the perfect spacing in the sharpened column, not one typographic sacrifice has been made in the creation of this image. But, if you notice, the page on the left side is too heavy with text, as if the living, breathing negative space on the right had cleared the clutter from it’s garage and moved it over to the left side, who has lost all ability to move.

The front cover at left seems like it was rushed: maybe this was the last area the designers got to before having to send the piece off to press. There are 3 main sections of type, and none of them really move the reader onto the next. Overall, the composition lacks definitive decision-making.

However, the spread on the right here is well-done. Well, the negative space on the left page (where the man stands between two columns of text) is slightly awkward, but this is definitely a spread to show your spouse (if you’re the designer). My favorite part is how the designer decided not to use two equal-height columns on the right page. That’s a great touch, because two equal columns would have ruined the design. Right now, one tall and one short helps to mirror the imperfection of the photograph behind it. This is definitely a magazine/newsletter spread with some emotion, something I am always delighted to feel when looking at 2-color jobs.

It is these touches of the grape-eating Swiss gods mixed with client/stress/deadline humanity that make Contreforme a great inspiration. In many of their projects, you can see excellent work mixed with the pressures of everyday design life.